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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Somewhat surprised this hasn't settled out of court then.
Especially now that F5 owns Nginx.
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.
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.
To put the "over there" remark in context, I grew up in a neighbourhing country.
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.
google translate: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 BS…
That has just been cast into doubt.
> copyright of the original nginx project are reassigned
Not reassigned. It would be found to never have been licensed.
> need only replicate something resembling the original codebase
Which is impossible without it becoming derived of the original. If you want to apply a patch to something it must first look like the original. A good chunk of the patches will have been derived from the original substantially. Which means they'd need to be rewritten too.
> the prospective future "owners" of nginx cannot realistically hope to control
Yes they could exert a lot of power and force people into paying. A clean-room effort would take a year! In that year they could go after everybody who is distributing old copies.
This is as bad as it gets if that company is found to own copyright.
- Interesting: you were working at Rambler while developing nginx. Did Rambler had any rights? That's a subtle question. How did you manage to keep the rights for project?
Yes, that is a subtle question. It interests others beside you, and we thoroughly worked on that. Russian law works this way: the company has the right on anything which was in employee's field of work or by it's own contract. So there has to be a contract with someone with purpose "to make a software product". In Rambler I was a system administrator, I'd developed in my free time, product was distributed under BSD license since the beginning, as an open-source software. Rambler started using it after the main features were ready. More than that, even the first usage was outside of Rambler, it were Rate.ee and zvuki.ru websites.
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.
A bit of context. Rambler used to be a somewhat successful and independent Internet company, but in dire straits recently because it's lost the market to its primary competitor - Yandex. So very much like Yahoo vs Google. Now it's been bought out by Sberbank - the largest state bank run by a good friend of Putin. Sberbank is looking at becoming at becoming an IT monster, being a provider of just about everything - fr…