In the event that F5 pulls an Oracle and horribly mismanages nginx, runs it into the ground, or tries to close it off, I vote we name the community fork "nginy".
Can’t wait till that forks to “nginz”
Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks
221–230 of 408 posts
Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks
#222Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could AGPL and sell proprietary exceptions. Amazon won't touch AGPL code.
Has the AGPL ever successfully held up in court?
Yes, Artifex sued Hancom over their use of Ghostscript [1]. (The article says GPL, but Ghostscript has an AGPL license.) The judge denied a motion to dismiss the claims, and they reached a settlement for an undisclosed amount.
I don't think many developers are aware that Ghostscript has an AGPL license, and I've heard that the commercial license costs $25k per year. It's very easy to just `apt-get install ghostscript` when you want to work with PDFs (e.g. with imagemagick), but this violates the AGPL license when you are running a SaaS application.
There are some permissively-licensed libraries (Apache 2.0) that provide similar functionality, such as PDFBox [2], or PDF.js + Node.js.
[1] https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/update-on-artifex-v-hanc...
Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't actually be guaranteed to win by being in the right. You can be in the right and lose.
>> Also, lawyers are not like Pokemon. You cannot beat the opposing team's lawyers by having more stronger lawyers. You can certainly lose by having bad lawyers, but you can only be guaranteed to win by being in the right. > You can't actually be guaranteed to win by being in the right. You can be in the right and lose. What he's obviously saying is that there is a seriously decreasing marginal benefit to more expens…
Well his intention is clear. But stating you are guaranteed to win if you are in the right strikes me as naive at best and woefully neglectful of reality at worst.
It's probably best stated like "lawyers are not _always_ like Pokemon". Sometimes they very definitely are.
Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
Instead of taking either of your words for it, are there any actual direct sources on Hashicorp's earnings? The only source I found was https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/2017-year-in-review which just says the company "can be successful", not that it is making money.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18363453 From Mitchell himself - at the very least they are growing very quickly. For all the complaining about "pricing pages", I think hashicorp is doing the right thing. Focus on selling to the big dogs who can give you a sustainable business and don't cloud your pipeline with smaller shops who wish to shop around.
Hashi should honestly set up a donations page, we'd love to throw them some money because we use their entire suite, but the pricing is clearly geared towards whales.
Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think Hashicorp[0] has nailed down the open source enterprise model perfectly. Where they make open source software for enterprise and provide services to support. [0]: https://www.hashicorp.com
I love Hashicorp products, however, all of their pricing behind "Contact Sales" is a major turn off. Why? I don't want to be the subject of a constant dripping of emails, calls, and missings from a sales person who is constant to get their numbers and puts me in their sales automation pipeline. Give me a ballpark estimate, I can go to whomever is needed, and we can go from there: I've never ran into a case where "I d…
Have to agree with you. At least their site says "Get Pricing" vs just "Pricing" and it says "Contact Us".
Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cash, apparently. I like how Wilson Sonsini advised F5 in the purchase while firm heir Peter Sonsini invested in Nginx corp. Good times for old money in the Valley.
I thought F5 was primarily a Seattle based company? I've known more F5 employees growing up in Seattle than Amazon employees at least. On another note, F5's poorly written code is the reason TLS 1.0 is considered insecure (using a variant of the POODLE attack), among other major security lapses.
POODLE was also an issue with other ADC vendors, I think it links back to where those ADC vendors got their initial TLS code, how the industry went about implementing it, etc.
Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks
#228So...what is the future of enterprise open source? Is there a future for enterprise open source? If you start a company and open source your core/clients, your product becomes part of AWS, and AWS runs you into the ground. If you mix in proprietary licenses to protect yourself, AWS forks your core, adds in open-source licensed clients, then runs you into the ground (and you lose open-source contributors/supporters as…
Obviously open source isn't going away. It's just that VC struggles to understand the implications, still, and the past half a decade has been imprinted deeply by all the cheap money. If your worst nightmare is that a big company like Amazon uses your software then perhaps your business model wasn't really for the cloud era. Selling licenses is to the VC crowd what sequels are to Hollywood, comfort food that everyone…
I agree. Open Source software is not a good way to build a moat, and investors should take this into account. It's good for companies that focus on building employees, teams, and customer relationships, and keeping them strong at all times. They can't fall back on exclusivity of their code, hosting, or support offerings. The ideal Open Source company would probably be something like Red Hat.
Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks
#229Would be curious to know if employees are able to tap into these profits, or if somehow they are getting screwed?
Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
What happened is the realisation that FOSS developers also have to pay their bills and idealism only takes so far. So anyone that refuses to pay for their tools will eventually either loose them, or contend to be happy to use lesser ones.
“Loose” is the opposite of “tight,” “lose” is the opposite of “find.” Easy to remember because the opposites have the same number of letters.
It always amazes me how often I see this spelling error.