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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

#211

Post by shkkmo »

Corazoor wrote: post #137
chupasaurus wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should remind you that there was a 1:342 ratio of "Not guilty" to "Guilty" decisions on the criminal cases in Russia last year, and the it's declining year-to-year.

I was interested in the ratio for the US, which based on a quick lookup seems to be 1:249 for federal cases... (Numbers taken from here: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/11/only-2-of-f... ) Just wanted to note that it is not a very good way to gauge opressiveness or fairness... In a perfect world, charges would only ever be brought against the guilty, and only the guilty would be found as such by court.…

> Just wanted to note that it is not a very good way to gauge oppressiveness or fairness

I would point out that the conviction ratio of the US is indicative of massive flaws in the powers that DAs have in most jurisdictions to force time limited plea agreements on defendants who have limited information and are under threat of charges with much higher penalties. This can usually be done without any oversight or approval from judges.

> In a perfect world, charges would only ever be brought against the guilty, and only the guilty would be found as such by court. In such a World the ratio would be 0:...

That sounds like a world with complete surveillance, no privacy and a judicial system with absolute power. Doesn't sound like a perfect world to me.

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

#212

Post by justinclift »

privateprofile wrote: post #136
fit2rule wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Australian checking in - and I'm not trolling either: I can just as easily read that 10-point list off for Australia.

Which companies were taken over illegally by organized groups in Australia? Because the OP's list was likely referring to a very different reality than what you imagine: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jun/24/russia.interna...

> Which companies were taken over illegally by organized groups in Australia?

That kind of stuff does happen in Australia too, it's not just widely known or reported on.

A good friend - (now-ex) business owner - several years ago had her company taken from her at gun point. With nothing to be done about it ("or else") by people who the police won't fk with.

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

#213

Post by sschueller »

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…

I would use the same approach for setting up a business in the US. Additionally I would require some huge insurance to protect myself from frivolous lawsuits.

As an outside business you want no servers in the US or use US dollars in any form as you may end up being sanctioned or worse extradited for things that are not illegal in your country.

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

#214

Post by jimjag »

smartynov wrote: post #167

I wrote a short summary on the situation for my English-speaking friends and would like to share here too. Introduction nginx is one of the most popular web-server software, used by hundreds of millions of websites worldwide. It was written by Igor Sysoev in early 2000s, was released and is maintained as an open source software. At the time of initial release Igor was working for Rambler (a Russian internet company).…

If nginx has dubious copyright, you cannot fork the code, since not being open source, it is legally not-forkable. Yes, you could do a complete rewrite, but that would require doing so in a "clean room" fashion, which would be very difficult.

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

#215

Post by adventured »

sschueller wrote: post #213
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…

I would use the same approach for setting up a business in the US. Additionally I would require some huge insurance to protect myself from frivolous lawsuits. As an outside business you want no servers in the US or use US dollars in any form as you may end up being sanctioned or worse extradited for things that are not illegal in your country.

> as you may end up being sanctioned or worse extradited for things that are not illegal in your country

You're of course conflating problems that are very common in Russia (hyper corruption, few human rights, zero business law protection, no functioning independent judicial system) with problems (the need for huge insurance, extradition, getting sanctioned) that are rare in the monster size $22 trillion US economy filled with millions of businesses.

List of countries currently meaningfully sanctioned by the US: Russia, Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, Syria

I certainly hope you don't live in North Korea while commenting freely on Hacker News (which is, naturally, located in the US).

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

#216

Post by peapicker »

snovv_crash wrote: post #174
larkost wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

InnoDB was owned by Oracle since 2005. I don't recall seeing any complaints about that at the time. In 2010, when Oracle bought Sun, then there were complaints from the MySQL team. But not complaints when Sun bought MySQL. Honestly, most people had been using InnoDB as their main MySQL engine for the previous 5 years already but there was no whinging from the MySQL team about that (that I recall).

It's all pretty arbitrary in my opinion -- if Monty and company hadn't whined so much when Oracle bought Sun, I doubt there would have been a fork.

Anyway... it never bothered me one way or the other.

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

#217

Post by woodandsteel »

emayljames wrote: post #205
woodandsteel wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am quite sure you are right this is corrupt putinism. Putin's economic system is crony capitalism. The laws mean nothing, it is all a matter of who has political corrections and pays the biggest bribe. That is why there is so little technological innovation in Russia, in spite of its being a huge developed country with a highly educated workforce (except, of course, for hacking). People with ideas know they will ju…

This sentiment is equally true for the west, crony capitalism. I just wish more people would acknowledge that the west is in the same state.

No, that's not true. There is a lot wrong with western capitalism, but it isn't nearly bad as what is going on in Putin's Russia.

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

#219

Post by linusnext »

iaml wrote: post #142
stjohnswarts wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some say Igor didn't move because he's a patriot. Ironic, isn't it?

He's being Matriotic. He lives in a Motherland, not a Fatherland.

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

#220

Post by incosta »

jimjag wrote: post #214
smartynov wrote: post #167

I wrote a short summary on the situation for my English-speaking friends and would like to share here too. Introduction nginx is one of the most popular web-server software, used by hundreds of millions of websites worldwide. It was written by Igor Sysoev in early 2000s, was released and is maintained as an open source software. At the time of initial release Igor was working for Rambler (a Russian internet company).…

If nginx has dubious copyright, you cannot fork the code, since not being open source, it is legally not-forkable. Yes, you could do a complete rewrite, but that would require doing so in a "clean room" fashion, which would be very difficult.

In any Western court an entity who forked it, would win a copyright lawsuit if Rambler sued. You cannot claim it was your proprietary code all of a sudden after it's been openly available for 15 years.
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