On Thursday evening, Russian police have raided Nginx’s Moscow office based on a complaint received from Rambler, a popular search engine of Russia. Further, they have detained the founders of Nginx on allegations of copyright infringements.

Nginx is an open-source web server platform powering almost 30% of the world’s websites on the internet today. It’s so popular that many of the big content delivery companies including the content streaming giants Twitch, Netflix etc relies on it! It’s the second most popular web server software after Apache HTTP and have attracted many due to its open-source web serving and reverse proxy capabilities.

The Story

Igor Sysoev, the founder of Nginx in 2011 was working at Rambler in the late 1990s. At Rambler, he was tasked as System Administrator and Igor was found coding besides his job in-office hours. The code he wrote was the heart of Nginx. He developed it in 2000 and made Nginx open source in 2004. Though Igor claimed he coded for Nginx in his free hours, Rambler was strongly claiming Igor was worked in their office hours, thus the rights of Nginx are owned by Rambler.

Rambler reported that Igor’s free distribution of Nginx code made them a loss of 51.4 million rubles ($820,000). Now, after raiding the office, Igor Sysoev along with another co-founder Maxim Konovalov were detained from the Corp. Both were charged as per Article 146 of the Russian Federation’s Criminal Code, which is the violation of copyright and related rights.

In April this year, American Technology Company F5 Networks acquired Nginx for $670 million, becoming its owner. A spokesperson F5 Networks has defended saying as

“Earlier today, Russian police came to the NGINX Moscow office. We are still gathering the facts and as such we have no further comments to make at this time.” to ZDNet.

Source – ZDNet