Russian police today raided the offices of NGINX, Inc. At Moscow. It is a subsidiary of F5 Networks and is behind the most popular technology for web servers. The equipment was confiscated and some employees were detained for questioning.
Moscow police swooped in after the Rambler team filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against NGINX Inc., claiming full ownership of NGINX's code web server. Rambler Group is the parent company of rambler.ru, one of Russia's largest search engines and online portals.
According to search warrant copies posted on Twitter today, Rambler alleges that Igor Sysoev developed the NGINX server while working as Admin systems for the company, so his company is the legal owner of the project.
Sysoev developed NGINX at the beginning of the 2000 decade and opened the NGINX code at 2004.
2009, founded NGINX, Inc., an American company, to provide tools and support services for the development of NGINX. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, but has offices around the world, including Moscow. The NGINX server source code is free and managed through an open source model.
Sysoev never disputed that he developed NGINX while working at Rambler. In an interview he gave in 2012, Sysoev claimed that he developed NGINX in his spare time and that Rambler didn't know about it for years. He said that the server first ran on the websites Rate.ee and zvuki.ru, and Rambler started to uses only after being asked by a colleague.
In February of 2019, NGINX finally released Apache HTTPD and became the most widely used server on the Internet. According to Netcraft in December of 2019 h NGINX has a market share that reaches 38%.
One month later, in March of 2019, F5 Networks electronic security and networking company acquired NGINX Inc. for 670 million dollars.
The news of the raid went viral today when a NGINX employee posted a screenshot of the Twitter search warrant. He later deleted the tweet at the request of the Russian police. But the raid was confirmed by other officials.
The same employee said that two NGINX executives were detained by police (co-founder and current CTO Igor Sysoev, as well as co-founder Maxim Konovalov).
