Bernd 12/13/2019 (Fri) 21:30:29 No.33083 del
And some local news.

Office of Nginx Inc, a company that makes the very popular and reliable web server - nginx - was raided by police yesterday. Company owner Igor Sysoev and few other company members were detained for some time. Police raid was made in authentic Russian style, OMON with rifles, raid over office and personnel homes, confiscation of computers etc.

Story is simple: Sysoev started to write nginx in early 2000s when he worked as system administration in Rambler, one of the local leaders of the internet industry - a large search engine, news site, mail provider and media giant. Sysoev wasn't coder and made nginx in his free time, then used nginx in Rambler too, opensourced it and, after some time, quit that company and started his own "Nginx Inc". In 2019 his company was bought by some American company named F5 for 670 000 000 $, but development still continued by Nginx Inc.

Now the Rambler Media Group suddenly remembers that 15 years ago Sysoev worked for them. For some specific reason they didn't go to court for administrative case, but asked police to open criminal case, so OMON and other funny things can be used.

Rambler has no real evidence that Sysoev worked on nginx as company worker, not as just common person, so the case is really about "unknown people violated copyright of Rambler", not about Sysoev personally (at least now). Even former boss of Rambler, famous professional patriot Ashmanov, said that Sysoev had no task to create nginx, so it couldn't belong to Rambler at all (i.e it wasn't part of his assignment, but hobby). Other related people also raised their concerns about that case, because it looks very stupid from start.

Surprisingly, all these happenings started only after Sberbank - biggest state-owned bank in Russia, bought large share of Rambler's stock. Company that officially claims copyright violation (some noname Cyprus company) is also owned by same person who owns part of Rambler and slightly related to Sberbank.

Sysoev is also was pretty patriotic person who didn't want to leave Russia when he could. It would be interesting to see if his views would change.