Sad times, I really like nginx. Maybe its time for nginy a web server developed in an extradition proof country with strong privacy protection and shell company laws. I could imagine saying that in jest but as these things get more common (a non-equivalent other than power imbalance story is the Apple suing its employee for starting a server chip company) its going to take a lot of planning to develop something and "keep" control of it.
Police conducted search in the Nginx office due to a copyright claim
121–130 of 228 posts
Re: Police conducted search in the Nginx office due to a copyright claim
#122I 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.
wow, I would have thought those dudes would have moved to a more friendly country years ago given the fame and profits from creating nginx.
It's frog in boiling water situation. For a long time the government was content with the money it could get from oil and mining, and many businesses were relatively safe. After the drop in oil prices and economic sanctions they started to get more creative, and the situation kept slowly worsening, until during this year there were multiple high profile cases like this.
Re: Police conducted search in the Nginx office due to a copyright claim
#123This is why I am very glad to be an independent contractor without the pesky “inventions” clause. With “inventions” clauses, if I worked on my open-source MaraDNS while on the clock, a company could make a reasonable legal case that they own it. Even in California, where a company can not own inventions done on one’s own equipment in one’s own time (as long as it’s not related to their day job), before signing an “in…
Replying to myself: Did you know that the website hosting this blog entry is using nginx as their server:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-pr...
There is something very ironic about a blog posting claiming that a company owns all of the software a developer makes in their free time, running on an open source server initially developed in Igor Sysoev’s free time while he was working for Rambler.
Re: Police conducted search in the Nginx office due to a copyright claim
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> As it is, nginx is licensed under BSD 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 o…
In that case, who would pay the new "owner" for the now unlicensed parts provided by outside contributors?
I see this having only two outcomes: either nothing happens (it stays BSD), or it becomes nuclear waste, and new owner cannot sell it because it is plagued by mutually incompatible legal status of different portions of the code.
I can't see how the third version, where it stays clean, but the new owner can milk it, is possible.
Re: Police conducted search in the Nginx office due to a copyright claim
#125I 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've some kind of reflex to say "come on, it can't be that bad over there", but then I read a thread like this and it's like a slap in my naivete's face. To put the "over there" remark in context, I grew up in a neighbourhing country.
This reminded me the Lebedev institute situation from last month: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/07/world/europe/russia-raid-...
Re: Police conducted search in the Nginx office due to a copyright claim
#126With the original open sourcing license of nginx in doubt, it is prudent for open source projects to look into alternatives?
Besides the standard Apache, may I suggest the underdog favorite of mine, Hiawatha? I was dissapointed when the license moved from GPL to MIT, but it's still awesome. [1] There is also Caddy, a go based webserver, which is Apache licensed I think. [2] Then there is also lighttpd, which is small and fast, but 3-clause bsd. [3] [1] https://www.hiawatha-webserver.org/ [2] https://caddyserver.com/ [3] https://www.lighttp…
Not to mention thttpd, which was updated as recently as last year:
Re: Police conducted search in the Nginx office due to a copyright claim
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is what's really concerning. If FSB was able to actually implement something and shell all nginx boxes (and thusly obtain SSL certs, intercept communications, etc..) imagine how much access they'd have.
that's not going to happen, too many security experts constantly monitoring nginx. That's the beauty of it being a high profile open source project.
Just like too many security experts monitoring crypto standards so NIST wouldn’t try to slip in a backdoor?
Re: Police conducted search in the Nginx office due to a copyright claim
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As it is, nginx is licensed under BSD 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 o…
In that case, who would pay the new "owner" for the now unlicensed parts provided by outside contributors? I see this having only two outcomes: either nothing happens (it stays BSD), or it becomes nuclear waste, and new owner cannot sell it because it is plagued by mutually incompatible legal status of different portions of the code. I can't see how the third version, where it stays clean, but the new owner can milk…
Well if it becomes toxic waste they could force everybody currently using it into licensing it from them. They could even try and go for damages for previous use.
Re: Police conducted search in the Nginx office due to a copyright claim
#129Oh my, I still see people in the comments who naively think this is a copyright issue. Seriously? 15 years after the alleged event? With physical violence against software developers? It's only one among thousands of cases when putinists rob successful companies. The world must put more pressure on putinism, because eventually all the stolen resources turn into imprisonments of people in the country and deaths of peo…
But this is absolutely a copyright issue! If a company has copyright on something I use, I need a license from them. Now we don't know what Russian courts will decide here, and we also don't know whether courts in other countries would respect that. What could happen as a worst case "robbery" scenario is that the developer is forced to agree they never had copyright! So whether or not the claim was unjustified, it mi…
And yet, copyright is a civil dispute. I’ve never heard of a police raid due to copyright.
Re: Police conducted search in the Nginx office due to a copyright claim
#130Oh my, I still see people in the comments who naively think this is a copyright issue. Seriously? 15 years after the alleged event? With physical violence against software developers? It's only one among thousands of cases when putinists rob successful companies. The world must put more pressure on putinism, because eventually all the stolen resources turn into imprisonments of people in the country and deaths of peo…
But this is absolutely a copyright issue! If a company has copyright on something I use, I need a license from them. Now we don't know what Russian courts will decide here, and we also don't know whether courts in other countries would respect that. What could happen as a worst case "robbery" scenario is that the developer is forced to agree they never had copyright! So whether or not the claim was unjustified, it mi…
I am not sure why this is being downvoted. If a Russian court determines (and/or the developer is forced to agree) that the BSD license was issued by someone who did not own the intellectual property, doesn't that create a significant legal issue for anyone who is using nginx under that BSD license since that license would no longer be valid?
Doesn't the potential for this exact sort of issue point out a flaw in how copyright law works (especially under international law?)