Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that the CTO, who is rather famous in the Russosphere, only gave a verbal permision, and only mentioned this happening when he was long gone from the company. The lesson here is that, open source or not, you always need real documents to demarkate your IP, otherwise you're asking for trouble later down the line. In typical US or UK companies software written would just go to the company, period. Here's…
Thanks for further clarification. Verbal approvals are not good. However, your reference to Spolsky is not correct as nginx was not a side project, but a core work project that powered all of Rambler's properties. The situation is similar to a Yahoo employee open-sourcing the Apache Traffic Server (very similar project with similar timelines, by the way; Rambler was once the "Russian Yahoo", while Yandex is the "Russ…
This is why a mentioned that Spolsky's article - it explains the reasoning behind this situation very well.
In Russia things are different. I don't really understand all the legal details. It all boils down to Sysoev's contract and his precise duties.
Anyways, Sysoev was an system admin at Rambler at the height of its popularity in early 00s. I believe that Rambler management back then did not really understand the importance of OSS, or even software in general, or search engine business in particular. This is not unsimilar to the Yahoo story.
So Rambler just ignored the whole thing back in the day. So did Sysoev - the public is not aware of any written permission he was given in regards to Nginx. This situation lacks the legal clarity necessary for a working businesses... Now that Nginx is bigger than Rambler ever was, scavengers decided to check if they can find a dollar or two here.