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Police conducted search in the Nginx office due to a copyright claim

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Re: Police conducted search in the Nginx office due to a copyright claim

#21

Post by meddlepal »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #14
eps wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be surprised if it had been. I'd wager Rambler is after the ngnix itself rather than some cash.

But even if they "owned" nginx - what does it get them? The community would immediately fork it and change the branding. The same happened to MySQL when Sun was bought by Oracle when MariaDB was forked - though I concede MariaDB isn't as popular as I hoped.

Would the community have any right to fork something the original author never had the right to open source in the first place?

Re: Police conducted search in the Nginx office due to a copyright claim

#23

Post by larzang »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #14
eps wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be surprised if it had been. I'd wager Rambler is after the ngnix itself rather than some cash.

But even if they "owned" nginx - what does it get them? The community would immediately fork it and change the branding. The same happened to MySQL when Sun was bought by Oracle when MariaDB was forked - though I concede MariaDB isn't as popular as I hoped.

> though I concede MariaDB isn't as popular as I hoped

I would think that's more due to the huge boom in Postgres popularity than any failing of Maria. For the projects that do still use MySQL, all the ones I know of are on Maria or Aurora rather than the Oracle implementation.

Re: Police conducted search in the Nginx office due to a copyright claim

#24

Post by seibelj »

vorot93 wrote: post #11

9.5 rules of doing business in Russia 1. Keep your servers abroad. 2. Register your domains abroad. 3. Register your company abroad. 4. Keep your money abroad and don't put all eggs in one basket. 5. Seriously, don't put all your eggs in one basket! 6. Keep your database abroad. 7. Document everything regarding your office setup. 8. Split the risks and assets. 9. You can give youself up voluntarily. Find a large patr…

Not a bad idea for any company in any country, the way laws surrounding tech are going.

Re: Police conducted search in the Nginx office due to a copyright claim

#25

Post by Spooky23 »

f311a wrote: post #13
vorot93 wrote: post #11

9.5 rules of doing business in Russia 1. Keep your servers abroad. 2. Register your domains abroad. 3. Register your company abroad. 4. Keep your money abroad and don't put all eggs in one basket. 5. Seriously, don't put all your eggs in one basket! 6. Keep your database abroad. 7. Document everything regarding your office setup. 8. Split the risks and assets. 9. You can give youself up voluntarily. Find a large patr…

That could happen in any country. That's a corporate dispute. Rambler sold their NGINX "copyright rights" to a shady law firm (Lynwood Investments CY Ltd).

Perhaps.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Magnitsky

Re: Police conducted search in the Nginx office due to a copyright claim

#26

Post by ivan4th »

I see it this way (being a Russian): it's not a copyright claim issue, but rather a hostage situation with bandits involved (a.k.a Russian authorities), and what they want is ransom so that top #1-2 nginx contributors don't go to jail for some 10 years.

Re: Police conducted search in the Nginx office due to a copyright claim

#27

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

lolc wrote: post #20
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But even if they "owned" nginx - what does it get them? The community would immediately fork it and change the branding. The same happened to MySQL when Sun was bought by Oracle when MariaDB was forked - though I concede MariaDB isn't as popular as I hoped.

If they indeed have copyright then you cannot legally fork it without them giving you licence to it. Just because you have the code doesn't mean you have the licence. All the other licences would be void.

Right, that would be "shared source" not "open source" (or _free software_).

As it is, nginx is licensed under BSD - that would include the many contributions by anyone else (which cannot be claimed if the original project's copyright is found to belong to someone else) - so if the official nginx goes private but the BSD license is found valid, then the community can continue to publish their own "not-nginx" under BSD.

In a worse-case-scenario where copyright of the original nginx project are reassigned and the BSD license annulled, then the community need only replicate something resembling the original codebase that the community's subsequent (and fully legitimately BSD-licensed) patches/changes/commits can be applied to (though this will take some time) - so in either event, the prospective future "owners" of nginx cannot realistically hope to control the world of nginx deployments and the extended nginx developer ecosystem.

Re: Police conducted search in the Nginx office due to a copyright claim

#29

Post by kelvich »

duelingjello wrote: post #3
ameshkov wrote: post #2

Igor Sysoev developed Nginx while working in Rambler (a Russian search engine) back in 2002-2004. Now, 15 years later, Rambler filed a copyright claim against Nginx and Igor, and demands (allegedly) 51M RUB from them.

I think the statue of limitations in Russia is under 10 years for most civil claims. Maybe someone can clarify what are the actual charges and what would the statute of limitations be? If statute of limitations ran out, maybe the corporate lawyer can get this thrown out quickly?

> what would the statute of limitations be

It is usually 3 years for such cases, but it counts since the moment of time when alleged infringement was discovered.

Re: Police conducted search in the Nginx office due to a copyright claim

#30

Post by iavael »

f311a wrote: post #13
vorot93 wrote: post #11

9.5 rules of doing business in Russia 1. Keep your servers abroad. 2. Register your domains abroad. 3. Register your company abroad. 4. Keep your money abroad and don't put all eggs in one basket. 5. Seriously, don't put all your eggs in one basket! 6. Keep your database abroad. 7. Document everything regarding your office setup. 8. Split the risks and assets. 9. You can give youself up voluntarily. Find a large patr…

That could happen in any country. That's a corporate dispute. Rambler sold their NGINX "copyright rights" to a shady law firm (Lynwood Investments CY Ltd).

That's not a corporate displute. It's probable cause in criminal law. Ngnix founders are already detained btw.
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