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Do svidaniya, Igor, and thank you for Nginx

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Re: Do svidaniya, Igor, and thank you for Nginx

#331

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…

The subtle thing here is that in the US and the UK typically things created "in the course of employment" (as defined in UK) would typically be owned by the employer. This is enforced either through a contract (e.g., in US), or both national law by default and the contract (e.g., in UK). So the employee would have no right to just open source things, or even create a business around it later.

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.

Re: Do svidaniya, Igor, and thank you for Nginx

#332
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you see, "svit" exists in Czech too. It's used mostly as "svit slunce" meaning the light of sun. But then in broader sense "svitit" is a verb meanning "to light" - so it's fairly obvious that "to shine a light" or "a surise" or to "greet someone" are all related to "meet againt" or "see again". It's all variations of the same basically. At least it seems so, I am no linguist.

Linguistic sources say that svet/svit/light/sunrise/world and videt/see/meet have completely different proto-indo-european roots - kweyt and weyd respectively. So nice theory, but no. “Svid” is not a root here, it’s “s”+”vid”.

interesting, didn't know that! can you point me to those resources to learn more, please? fascinating topic for me.

Re: Do svidaniya, Igor, and thank you for Nginx

#333

I remember the days circa 2009 when the Nginx docs pages still had lots of Soviet-style graphics... those were the days :)

Yeah that was great. I think we all felt like we had a secret superpower few others knew about.

My job as an intern was to write an Nginx plugin for a specific type of filtering for high performance- boss was abit of a masochist ;)

Re: Do svidaniya, Igor, and thank you for Nginx

#335
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English. The answer is almost always English, and its "quirky" way of transliteration.

I don't think so. From what little Russian I know, the original is до свидания, with an O, but in most dialects an unstressed O is pronounced A: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_phonology#Unstressed_v...

It's even more convoluted than that. Due to vowel reduction, unstressed o is pronounced as a, but до is one syllable so the o is stressed. When pronouncing до separately, it would definitely be pronounced as do, but до свидания is always said quickly as if it was one word, so the до turns into an unstressed syllable.

As a side note, Russian pronunciation is remarkably uniform compared to languages like English. Dialects do exist but in practice the vast majority of speakers will pronounce things very similarly. The phonetics are also so different from English than the typical English speaker will not pronounce any Russian words close to native pronunciation.

Re: Do svidaniya, Igor, and thank you for Nginx

#336
post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My memory is hazy but I think I remember running into an actual memory leak in lighttpd circa 2008. We were serving dynamic content via FastCGI, IIRC. This was a long time ago and I'm pretty hazy on the details, but I'm pretty sure I remember finding memory leak bug discussions on the lighttpd website around that time, and no clear answers on how to avoid it.

Back in 2008, if you had a FastCGI backend that produced a large body, such as a file download, lighttpd would allocate the same amount of memory and forget to free it afterward. Everything would work fine for a while, but then someone attaches a large file on your busy PHP forum and bam! Your 720MB linode is thrashing like there's no tomorrow. The proper workaround was to send an X-Sendfile header to instruct lightt…

Just to say thank you for this closure ~15 years later. I was on team lighttpd back in the day (I think I liked the config syntax more? I honestly can't remember) but this bug caused a lot of grief and at the time, it appeared like no one knew the cause. Still, lighttpd/fcgi was still better than the epic custom Apache C++ module disaster in the previous iteration.

Re: Do svidaniya, Igor, and thank you for Nginx

#337
post #230
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same thought. I think it's more Slavic vs Germanic/Romantic. "sv", without a vowel, doesn't exist in any word I can think of. However, in Russian, consonant clusters like that are pretty common. See also, from the article, Sberbank. I'd bet there's plenty of examples in reverse too.

svelte is probably the most common english one

Ah that's a good one!

Re: Do svidaniya, Igor, and thank you for Nginx

#340
post #288
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, epoll was a big part of it making it work around async io rather than threaded. If someone is interested in reading more, "Flash: An Efficient and Portable Web Server" is a good read on the topic: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/usenix99/full_papers/pa... . It has no relation to Adobe Flash. epoll has the advantage of operating in O(1) time rather than O(n) time as well which becomes important when you have…

Although, similar facilities were already available in other systems such as Solaris, Windows NT, FreeBSD.

Igor was from Russian FreeBSD community so kqueue was probably the first.
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