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We Should Ditch Nginx

hipyoungstartup.com

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Re: We Should Ditch Nginx

#121

Post by ars_technician »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #74
twelve40 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although I share your sentiment, noc and devops people are legitimately paranoid about stability, so no, he's neither lazy nor unskilled - this part I can easily believe. What I can't understand is, if they have tons of traffic and he admittedly uses a product he likes, why doesn't he just pay for it. FOSS does not enslave its authors to perpetually provide free infinite scalability for every use case.

Very true. Forgot to mention that part. Why not pay for a great product if you find it useful. I've paid for FOSS stuff before, and supported distros I use...

Price restriction in this case. 100 vms * $1300 a VM = a big pile of cash that wasn't in the budget.

Re: We Should Ditch Nginx

#122

Post by nemothekid »

ars_technician wrote: post #109
grey-area wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps he doesn't have the hours/skills free to do so. People are free to complain about things or do a 'call-to-arms' about things they can't fix themselves. I think in the case of open source we have far too many people who feel entitled to the work of others without any recompense already. Working on a large OS project like this is mostly a thankless task - people will complain about the problems while taking for…

>Yes, it would be like that (though this feature is more trivial and could be worked around, and is not an existing feature, so not exactly the same). That's the way companies make money when they segment their market and have an OS offering and a commercial one. Nothing wrong with that. If you don't like the rules set by the creators, don't use it; write your own software or use other software. If they had retrospec…

>What about OpenStack? Maybe Linux or Firefox? None of these projects turn to their users to squeeze money out of them to activate basic features.

Thats disingenuous. Linux squeezes money out of users via RHEL and SUSE. Firefox straight up sells your data to Google (who in turn provides over 90% of Mozilla revenue).

Even Apache, a "good" open source foundation, houses Cassandra, which is largely contributed to by DataStax, which sells its own version of Cassandra which has "pay-only" features such as Hadoop integration without the need of HDFS.

Long story short, there are large number of OSS that function the way nginx is running things right now. You could probably throw a pebble in the OSS/Enterprise ocean and land on a project that has "pay-only" features. Unless you are willing write the solution yourself, no one in obliged to take up the mantle and fix your problems for you.

Re: We Should Ditch Nginx

#123

Post by ars_technician »

Rantenki wrote: post #45

It's $1350/server per year to pay for the feature. You mention in your post: "Our noble HTTP server". Wait. Not plural? I know that a that is a fair bit of money for a bootstrapped startup, but if you are anticipating enough traffic that the syslog feature is an issue, AND you have at least three floors of offices (as mentioned in your blog post), then maybe your OPEX prioritization is a bit off, and you should just…

Yes, $1350/server per year * 100 VMs which just broker requests from clients to php-fpm. Totally reasonable. /s

For that price, they could pay someone who's sole job is to maintain a private fork with the feature. It's not like they can submit it back since nginx would reject an enterprise competing patch, but at least they would have the functionality and the benefit of another dev on hand.

Re: We Should Ditch Nginx

#124

Post by ars_technician »

mythz wrote: post #26

Sigh, another example of the worst thing about OSS - privileged, self-entitled users thinking the world owes them something.

They aren't self-entitled if the project has any sense of community and has accepted external contributions of code/documentation/etc. Lots of external hours go into projects like this and moves like these are myopic and generally a big 'screw-you' to active external contributors.

Re: We Should Ditch Nginx

#125

Post by ars_technician »

avenger123 wrote: post #66
secstate wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with your statement on it's face, in the context of the OP, this is just whinging. The author is not just offering constructive criticism on a possible fork of NGINX, he's calling the NGINX business out for "withholding" features. The tone is distinctly one of being "owed" a feature common to another popular FOSS project, instead of being grateful for everything NGINX provides (which is a lot, and proba…

What I love the most about the author's post is the "fork it" part. The author goes out of his/her way to pick out what's wrong with NGINX due to the inadequate SAN infrastructure and at the end suggests someone else fork the project so his/her company can continue to milk the free software of the backs of others. It's somewhat disgusting.

>The author goes out of his/her way to pick out what's wrong with NGINX due to the inadequate SAN infrastructure

Wrong. NGINX has recognized this as a problem and discovered apache solved it years ago for a reason. So they decided to play catch-up, but charge for it.

>company can continue to milk the free software of the backs of others.

>It's somewhat disgusting.

That's FOSS. If you don't like it, don't use it. What NGINX is doing is disgusting. The FOSS community actively invested in NGINX via external patches, documentation, bug reports, how-to's, chef-scripts, etc and NGINX is paying everyone back by charging for features.

Re: We Should Ditch Nginx

#126

Post by user-id »

gkoberger wrote: post #17

Given the name of the blog (and how it's written), I assume this is meant to be satire?

Given the content of at least 1 other related site hosted on the same IP (simulantproductions.com), I think it's fair to say this article is satire and should be considered flamebait.

http://viewdns.info/reverseip/?host=www.hipyoungstartup.com&...

The three other websites mention the same people so it's fair to say the fourth is just another project of theirs.

Re: We Should Ditch Nginx

#127

Post by ars_technician »

pjmlp wrote: post #47
secstate wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with your statement on it's face, in the context of the OP, this is just whinging. The author is not just offering constructive criticism on a possible fork of NGINX, he's calling the NGINX business out for "withholding" features. The tone is distinctly one of being "owed" a feature common to another popular FOSS project, instead of being grateful for everything NGINX provides (which is a lot, and proba…

This part of FOSS culture I really dislike as a developer. Many people seem to consider an offence that other developers need to make a living, instead of being grateful of being able to sell stuff using software they haven't paid a dime for. Then become outraged when the developers come to the conclusion that the baker won't sell bread for pull requests. This is what moved me into the direction of suggesting dual li…

What you are suggesting is the part of a greedy FOSS project. One that enjoys the external open source contributions, yet still charges for features in the software. It's disgusting and an insult to your contributors, unless you pay them all money as well.

There is nothing wrong with making money, but don't to it with sleazy tactics like this that put you in a conflict of interest. Charge for support or a hosted version, but don't artificially cripple the software. If you do want to go that way, don't be open source at all because you are just a leech on the community.

Re: We Should Ditch Nginx

#129

Post by DigitalSea »

davidw wrote: post #105
DigitalSea wrote: post #21

I can't tell if this post is serious or not (the domain name throws me off a little). I use NGINX myself, but I am also aware that Apache is playing catchup quite quickly as well and Apache 5.4 is a decent version of the popular open source server. Use whatever fits your needs, just because it didn't fit your needs doesn't mean you should go forcing your opinion upon others. Many people including myself have had noth…

Apache httpd is at version 2.4.7: http://httpd.apache.org/

I had MySQL on the mind obviously. I meant 2.4, thanks for point it out though!

Re: We Should Ditch Nginx

#130

Post by ars_technician »

cbsmith wrote: post #27

Really, it isn't too hard to patch the logging in nginx and/or have a named pipe that writes to syslog. My team made a patch to have it log to UDP multicast, and it wasn't too bad. If you're really pissed at the nginx guys, contribute the patch back. Sure, I quibble with their approach to a commercial model, but I really think this is a case of "me thinks she doth protest too much" in both the literal and implied mea…

They wouldn't take it because it competes with the enterprise features. Do you see why this model is fundamentally incompatible with open source now?
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