The most precious thing that every person has is his life and the time allotted to him. Everyone manages these resources in their own way. There is no second chance, you cannot be born again, you cannot rewind the clock. Igor Sysoev, day after day, devoted almost 20 years of his life to painstaking work to give the people of all Humanity, perhaps, the best web server in existence. Igor was absolutely not obliged to publish the source code under a free license, but he did so voluntarily, it was his contribution to changing our World for the better.
It is unlikely that Igor thought on the day when he published the source code for the first time that open source would help him become a dollar billionaire. He probably did not think about how someday one day he would fall on a par with other founding fathers of the Internet, such as , or . And it came true: to date, according to Netcraft, the number of sites served by nginx has exceeded 447 million. And you, too, can use this web server for your site, this is a work of modern art, and it's completely free!
Therefore, in the end, the money that Igor Sysoev happily received was honestly earned with his own blood andΠΎthat (and not on grief and suffering or the slave labor of other people), he deserved them! His Fields or Nobel Peace Prize if you will...
In business, there are always conflicts and frictions; its essence is competition. But now an indefinite circle of very specific people does not want to win a competitor in an honest market struggle, but this grouping wants to trample the merit of Igor Sysoev into the mud, depreciate, expose the philanthropist as a thief, and by right of strength. And they try not to do it right bona fide applicant - in the arbitration court, but in the dirtiest way in the spirit of the 90s, with the involvement of the resources of law enforcement agencies.
NGINX has become an iconic example for us at the ReactOS Foundation of how you can humanely make money from open source software and at the same time give people the happiness of sharing information and the freedom to be themselves.
Help the fairy tale come true! Don't let the free project die!
Source: habr.com