Nginx/Rambler Dispute Over Code

• What’s yours is ours Rambler Group claims exclusive rights to world’s most popular web-server software, six months after it's sold to U.S. company for 670 million dollars

  On Thursday, December 12, Russian law enforcement raided the Moscow office of the IT company “Nginx,” which owns the eponymous web-server used by almost 500 million websites around the world. According to several reports, Nginx co-founders Igor Sysoev and Maxim Konovalov spent several hours in police interrogation. The search is part of a criminal case based on charges by a company tied to the Russian billionaire and Rambler Group co-owner Alexander Mamut, whose businesses believe they own the rights to the Nginx web-server because Sysoev started developing the code while working for Rambler in 2004. Meduza’s correspondent Maria Kolomychenko looks at how Sysoev and his partners spent 15 years creating the world’s most popular web-server before selling it to an American firm for $670 million, and how Rambler decided, half a year later, that it owns the technology.

• ‘A typical racket, simple as that’ Nginx co-founder Maxim Konovalov explains Rambler's litigation against his company, which develops the world’s most popular web-server

  Russia’s IT industry is in the midst of a major conflict between businesses belonging to “Rambler Group” co-owner Alexander Mamut and the company “Nginx,” created by Igor Sysoev and his partner Maxim Konovalov. Nginx’s key product is the eponymous web-server used by more than a third of the world’s websites. Sysoev first released the software in 2004, while still an employee at Rambler, which is now claiming exclusive rights to Nginx, based on its interpretation of Russian law. The police have already joined the dispute, launching a criminal investigation and searching Nginx’s Moscow office. In an interview with Meduza, Nginx co-founder Maxim Konovalov described the police raid and explained why he thinks it took Rambler 15 years to claim ownership over the coveted web-server technology, which recently sold to the American corporation “F5 Networks” for $670 million.

New postmarketOS build infrastructure is powered by sourcehut builds

Development effort from our end went into build.postmarketos.org (in short BPO). This is the name of both the website seen in the second screenshot, as well as the source code for the program that generates the website. Besides that, it manages the jobs that run on sourcehut builds. BPO has 91% test coverage. A rather unusual design decision is that the website is generated as static HTML page whenever there is a change. It is not generated on demand when requested via HTTP. This seems highly appropriate though, as the content at most changes a few times per second. We have come a long way from initially having no binary repository and expecting all developers to build everything from source at the project's public launch in May of 2017. During the following months we had an inofficial repository of binary packages for Plasma Mobile packages on postmarketOS at one point. Until we got the first official binary repository at the end of 2017. But that one had to be manually triggered and the build logs where not available online. Now it's completely automated and transparent, and multiple developers of the core team are able to fix things if they go south. Therefore we allow more people to merge incoming patches, and it is already apparent that this has resulted in increased productivity.

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