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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

#171

Post by nybble41 »

jsty wrote: post #19
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're angling for a ruling that they've always had the copyright to the code (or at least core / original parts), then presumably any licenses (FOSS or otherwise) granted by anyone who isn't Rambler would be null and void.

Yes, and while the focus is on the Nginx project, there are probably other projects that used code from Nginx that would also be affected.

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

#172

Post by MaxBarraclough »

PudgePacket wrote: post #67
lolc wrote: post #20

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.

If you contributed to nginx, do these new owners own your contributions if you submitted them under what turned out to be false pretenses ? Shouldn't all the community contributions be void because of that? That would significantly reduce nginx's worth. If not, what's to stop other companies doing this in a predatory way? Start an "open source" project, gather years of valuable contributions from a enthusiastic commu…

> what's to stop other companies doing this in a predatory way? Start an "open source" project, gather years of valuable contributions from a enthusiastic community, then pull the rug?

Pulling the rug would mean revealing that your company never really owned the copyright, so at the very least you make yourself look bad.

Also, I don't imagine courts take a favourable view of transfers of ownership which are essentially fraudulent. I'm not a lawyer, as you can doubtless tell, but I presume it wouldn't be good for you if they could prove you'd planned the thing from the start.

There's an analogy outside of copyright: stolen goods. Sale of stolen goods isn't a legal transfer of ownership, but you don't want to be caught knowingly selling stolen goods, much less proven guilty of it (and the whole point of 'pulling the rug' is that things play out in court). I presume a similar principle would apply with intellectual property.

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

#173

Post by shkkmo »

punarinta wrote: post #146
shkkmo wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When you say "if a Russian court determines" this sounds like an insult to me. Simply check out how recently lots of people have been convicted for nothing, for a poster, a like, for jogging, for trying to get elected, for a youtube video. I kindly ask you to stop believing that Russia is a place where unicorns shit with rainbow and courts work. No, they do not. And by not acknowledging putin's terror against us you…

I am not claiming anything about the justice or fairness of Russian courts, you are reading far more into my comment than was present. This is precisely why I mentioned that the developer may be forced to agree.

From my understanding of how copyright law works, if the local court determines that who a copyright holder is, international courts are required by treaty to uphold that determination.

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

#174

Post by snovv_crash »

larkost wrote: post #134
larzang wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Not really. The real reason is that Oracle has done a reasonably good job of continuing the development of the Open Source project. You can certainly argue about what things they should have focused on (the MariaDB community has done that, mostly arguing there should be more engines), but Oracle has done nothing to damage the project, and a lot of good in it (serious improvements to the main engine, InnoDB).

If MariaDB hadn't been there, and as competitive as it was, I doubt Oracle would have played so nicely with MySQL.

Oracle has one goal, and that is to make money. They've realised due to the competitive pressure in this case that they can't abandon the community and go straight into value extraction mode.

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

#175

Post by neltnerb »

mlyle wrote: post #81
neltnerb wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you will run into conflict of interest issues with having your employer pay you to use your product. It might fly at some places, but I would be hesitant of running afoul of all manner of issues if there could be a perception that you are leveraging your employment position to profit your own company. Especially if your employer accepts money from the government. I agree with the first two though. I personall…

> I think you will run into conflict of interest issues with having your employer pay you to use your product. It might fly at some places, but I would be hesitant of running afoul of all manner of issues if there could be a perception that you are leveraging your employment position to profit your own company. I think when it's literally "pay me one dollar for a company-wide license, so there's mutual consideration…

It's not about amounts, it's about perception and policies. The idea of selling a product even remotely related to my job description to my current employer just sounds like a whole bag of nasty waiting to drop.

What happens when you leave the company and try to increase the price to make a business out of it? Did you create a situation through the course of your employment such that the company you left is now dependent on your products? Would they have made different choices in what tool to use if it cost more at the time? Will even bringing up the idea of charging your employer cost you a lot of social capital with your supervisor and make you look like you're aiming to resign soon to work on a new project and aren't fully committed to your job?

Will they expect you to offer software for a $1 indefinite license including free updates for life or not including support or upgrades? Will they balk when your support or custom features cost $200/hr and cry foul? Companies are led by MBAs. They don't want to spend money and are very good at avoiding it at your expense.

Will they use their vastly larger capital to sue you for it, if indeed it is critical to them, arguing that if you felt it was useful enough to the company to sell it to them then it was part of your job responsibilities to work on it (excepting the case where you did the project prior to starting work at the company). Will you somehow be able to prove that it was done outside of work hours and relied in no way on your confidential knowledge of what the company does?

It's just messy and the potential for really really messy. You might manage to pull it off, but I personally would not try this unless the case was extremely clear cut and everyone involved knew everything so that no one could retroactively claim it was done in an underhanded way. But I was a boy scout so I learned that if you aren't willing to be totally transparent in your approach you probably actually don't think it's ethical. Clearly not applicable to today's top business schools, of course...

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

#178

Post by wallace_f »

punarinta wrote: post #146
shkkmo wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When you say "if a Russian court determines" this sounds like an insult to me. Simply check out how recently lots of people have been convicted for nothing, for a poster, a like, for jogging, for trying to get elected, for a youtube video. I kindly ask you to stop believing that Russia is a place where unicorns shit with rainbow and courts work. No, they do not. And by not acknowledging putin's terror against us you…

In America our courts work better, but we still have a lot of improvement. Hopefully your countrh serves as a warning to us and not as a whipping boy.

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

#179

Post by smsm42 »

shkkmo wrote: post #130
lolc wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Russian "court" can "determine" whatever whoever paid the court wants it to "determine". It's not a flaw in the copyright law - it's a flaw in Russia having no real independent non-corrupt court system. You can't fix this flaw by writing different license or signing some different papers.

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

#180

Post by walshemj »

chupasaurus wrote: post #138
chupasaurus wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the same quality translation of a commentary by Lynwood Investments CY Ltd, the company which initiated the case, given to the online magazine The Bell [0]: The Rambler Internet Holding (edit: it's legal name is Rambler Group LLC) company found that it's exclusive rights on NGINX web server, which was developed by it's employees with use of corporate resources, were violated by third parties. The company gave the…

The commentary[0] of Igor Ashmanov, who was CEO of Rambler when they hired Sysoev, on the document in tweet: Sysoev was developing in his work time, in the office, with company's equipment. (quote from the order: edit) 1. Bullshit. There isn't anything on that in our laws. You have to very accurately prove that there was an assignment on that. "In his work time" or "with company's equipment" - doesn't work. Everythin…

Not sure I would buy that system administrator's don't write code and writing a webserver which is closely related to a sysads job.
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