Maxim Dunin, one of the three active lead developers of Nginx, announced the creation of a new fork — FreeNginx. Unlike the Angie project, which also created a branch off Nginx, the new fork will be developed solely as a non-commercial initiative by the community. FreeNginx is positioned as the primary descendant of Nginx — "given the details — rather, the fork remained with F5." The goal of FreeNginx is to ensure development of Nginx free from arbitrary corporate interference.
The reason for creating the new project was disagreement with the management policies of F5, the company that owns the Nginx project. F5 modified the security policy without consulting the developer community and moved to a practice of assigning CVE identifiers to label as vulnerabilities issues that potentially threaten user security (Maxim was against assigning CVEs to these bugs, as they reside in experimental and non-default code).
After the closure of the Moscow office in 2022, Maxim left F5 but retained his role in development through a separate agreement and continued to develop and oversee the Nginx project as a volunteer. According to Maxim, the change in security policy contradicts the existing agreement, and he can no longer control the modifications made to Nginx by developers from F5, which is why he can no longer consider Nginx an open and free project developed for the common good.
Source: opennet.ru
