Other materials on the topic:
—
—
—
According to information from one of the employees, searches are being carried out in the Moscow office of Nginx open source developers as part of a criminal case, in which Rambler is the plaintiff (Below is the official response of the company's press service on this issue and confirmation of the existence of claims against Nginx). As evidence, a photo of the decision to conduct a search as part of a criminal case initiated on December 4, 2019 under Article 146 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation “Infringement of copyright and related rights” is provided.
Photo of the search warrant![[Updated at 10:52 AM, 14.12.19/XNUMX/XNUMX] The Nginx office was searched. Kopeiko: "Nginx was developed by Sysoev independently"](https://prohoster.info/wp-content/plugins/wp-fastest-cache-premium/pro/images/blank.gif)
As expected, the plaintiff is the company Rambler, and the defendant is still "an unidentified group of persons", and in the future - the founder of Nginx Igor Sysoev.
The essence of the claim: Igor started working on Nginx as an employee of Rambler, and only after the tool became popular, he founded a separate company and attracted investments.
Why Rambler remembered his “property” only 15 years later is unclear.
The first information about the searches and the criminal case was published on Twitter by the user Igor Ippolitov, apparently an Nginx employee. According to Ippolitov, representatives of the Ministry of Internal Affairs forced him to delete the tweet, but screenshots and photographs of the search warrant have been preserved, which are now circulating on the network, including .
Apparently, the Nginx office was searched. They say they stole everything from Rambler. The lawsuit is probably from Rambler. If true, the story is strange. There are many witnesses in the IT environment of how nginx developed, it is not clear why this lawsuit
— bobuk (@bobuk)
So far, there has been no official confirmation that a search was carried out from Sysoev or Nginx officials. Perhaps this is due to the peculiarities of criminal proceedings.
If the document photographed by the Nginx employee is real, then the criminal case was initiated under parts “b” and “c” of Article 146 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, and these are the points “on an especially large scale” and “by a group of persons by prior agreement or an organized group”:
shall be punishable by compulsory labor for a term of up to five years, or by deprivation of liberty for a term of up to six years, with or without a fine in the amount of up to XNUMX thousand roubles, or in the amount of the wage or salary, or any other income of the convicted person for a period of up to three years.
Thus, Sysoev and other founders face not only the loss of the project, but also up to 6 years in prison.
UPD:
Of with Igor Sysoev to the magazine "Hacker" on Habré (according to to this news):
- Interesting: you worked at Rambler and worked on nginx. Rambler didn't have any rights? This is such a delicate question. How did you manage to save the rights to the project?
Yes, this is a rather subtle question. Of course, it is of interest not only to you, and we have worked it out quite thoroughly. In Russia, the legislation is arranged in such a way that the company owns what is done as part of labor duties or under a separate agreement. That is, there should be an agreement with a person, where it would be said: you need to develop a software product. At Rambler, I worked as a system administrator, developing in my spare time, the product was released under the BSD license from the very beginning, as open source software. In Rambler, nginx began to be used already when the main functionality was ready. Moreover, even the first nginx was not used in Rambler, but on Rate.ee and zvuki.ru.
UPD #2:
On Sysoev and Konovalov were detained.
UPD #3:
The comment was published by the editors и :
We found that the exclusive right of the Rambler Internet Holding company to the nginx web server was violated as a result of the actions of third parties.
In this regard, Rambler Internet Holding ceded the rights to bring claims and lawsuits related to the violation of rights to nginx to Lynwood Investments CY Ltd, which has the necessary competencies to restore justice in the issue of ownership of rights.
press service Rambler Group
According to Kommersant's information, Lynwood Investments is associated with Rambler Group co-owner Alexander Mamut. Through this company, the businessman owned the British book chain Waterstones.
Kommersant published some more statements from Rambler's press service:
The rights to the Nginx web server belong to Rambler Internet Holding. Nginx is a service work, which Igor Sysoev has been developing since the early 2000s as part of his labor relations with Rambler, therefore any use of this program without the consent of Rambler Group is a violation of the exclusive right.
press service Rambler Group
UPD #4:
In the comments to the news about the search in the Nginx office on roem.ru Russian entrepreneur , who in the early 00s served as Executive Director of Rambler:
>Sysoev was engaged in development during working hours, in the office of Rambler, using Rambler equipment. His “free” time began after leaving the office.
1. This is nonsense. There is no such thing in our legislation. You need to prove it very specifically, for this you need a service assignment for this. “On service equipment” or “during working hours” - does not work. Everything is possible - and the intellectual property of the author.
2. In addition, when hiring Sysoev — I hired him in 2000 — it was specifically stipulated that he has his own project, and he has the right to deal with it. It was then called something like mod_accel, he gave it the name Nginx somewhere in 2001-2002.
I can testify about this in court if need be. And my partner in AiP and Kribrum, Dmitry Pashko, then technical director of Rambler, his immediate supervisor - I think, too.
3. He worked at Rambler as a sysadmin. Software development was not part of his job responsibilities at all.
4. I think Rambler will not be able to show a single paper, not to mention a non-existent work assignment for the development of a web server.
UPD #5:
Source of thebell.io resource, familiar with Nginx staff, that Sysoev and Konovalov were released from the Moscow police department and their phones were confiscated.
UPD #6:
After the interrogation, the CEO of Nginx spoke about how the search took place and his thoughts about his reasons with the editors of Forbes. According to Konovalov, they also came home with searches, and not just to the company's office:
They came to me at 7 in the morning, riot police with machine gunners ... some people walked with my photo along the entrance and found out where I live, although I never hid.
Laptops and mobile devices were taken away from the founders of Nginx. Both entrepreneurs were interrogated for about 4 hours.
Forbes
The CEO of Nginx believes that the sale of the project to the American company F5 for $670 million became the reason for the criminal case and searches:
If we had not sold the company, or sold it cheaply, or went bankrupt, none of this would have happened.
Konovalov is also grateful to the community for the raised wave of support:
I haven't read the news yet, but I've heard of a huge wave of support. Many thanks to everyone, we are just very glad that there is such support.
In the near future, Konovalov and Sysoev plan to develop a plan to protect Nginx from Rambler's claims.
UPD #7:
Yesterday in the EJE-list, Andrey Kopeiko, Sysoev's former head at Rambler (he was in office from 2000 to 2005), spoke about Rambler's claims against Nginx. Kopeiko gave his permission to publish his message to Ashmanov, we quote:
I was the immediate supervisor of Igor Sysoev from 01.09.2000/09.11.2005/XNUMX to XNUMX/XNUMX/XNUMX (last night I checked on a copy of the work report found at home).
Therefore, yesterday I was involved as a witness in the case, and from 12 to 22+ hours I explained in detail to investigators and operatives
* what is proxying and accelerating sites;
* what is the difference between nginx and Apache;
* who gets, and what benefits from reducing the consumption of server computing resources by the web server;
* as the new owner of Rambler, Lopatinsky for a year and a half (from mid-2001 to early 2003) stopped purchasing servers and how we squeezed all the juice out of the available hardware;
* how initiatively and without protocol the work of system administrators in Rambler was arranged (this caused the greatest surprise: “how can it be: they were not given tasks, but they themselves suggested how to do better” ???);
* how messy and "startup" was the decision-making about testing various web servers on the company's servers.I did not give him any service assignments, either oral or written, neither for the development of mod_accel, nor for the development of nginx.
And I don’t know that someone would give him such a task through my head.It so happened that I became the second user of nginx (since version 0.0.2) - in those years I worked part-time as the administration of the zvuki.ru website, which was located on a colocation in Rambler-Telecom.
And in 2002-2003, Igor and I debugged the nginx functionality on the traffic of this site, which is evidenced in our email correspondence with him. At first, he could not even demonize, and had to run it through a wrapper. So far on the site as examples, pieces of the then Zvukov.ru config are given.
The first user of nginx was Andrey Sitnikov - I remember it as "infonet.ee", but Igor now calls it "rate.ee". However, it doesn't matter.
In the spring of 2004, as far as I remember, Igor published nginx on his website (which was then hosted outside of Rambler), and made an announcement in the Russian Apache mailing list - after which the circle of nginx users expanded significantly.
In the autumn of 2004, the Rambler-Photo project was launched (probably, the date is 04.10.2004/XNUMX/XNUMX from there), in which nginx was first used on Rambler's combat servers. For by that time, the module for proxying HTTP requests to the backend had been added to a more or less working state, so far only one.
In this way,
* Nginx was developed by Sysoev completely independently and on his own initiative;
* in the official duties of the "system administrator of Rambler" in 2000-2005 there was no obligation to "program" (in the "classifier of professions" (or whatever it is called) the phrase - I write from memory, according to the investigator - "is obliged to create scripts / programs to facilitate Managed Product Support” appeared in the description of the “system administrator” profession only in the OKP 2005 version, i.e. in 2006;
* there was no "service assignment" either verbally or even more so in writing;
* Rambler was neither the first user of nginx, nor even, probably, the tenth;
* yes, in later years, Igor maintained nginx on the mailing list during business hours, but the benefits of saving on servers probably paid for his 20+ patches;
* how much he programmed "during working hours, on a working computer" - this is a question for him.
As a witness, I can’t tell you the details - but I can say that the evidence base presented (the part that was shown to me) looks extremely weak, and in places says exactly the opposite.
PS A similar “garbage” happened in R. not only with nginx:
* in 1999-2001, Lyokha Tutubalin, the then developer of Russian Apache, worked there; EMNIP, during this time there were several minor releases;
* in 2000-2002, 3 main Russian Postgres committers worked there - Bartunov, Rodichev, Sigaev; it was for Rambler news (the Discovery content rendering platform) that they added data internationalization to Postgres, i.e. support for non-ascii strings;
* in 2004+, Gleb Smirnov and Ruslan Yermlilin came to Rambler, already being FreeBSD committers; Gleb finished CARP and made IPv6 support there.All these people sawed open source products during working hours.
But Rambler makes no claims to FreeBSD, PostgreSQL, or Apache. I think this is due to the fact that there are no specialists left in the "technological company" who are able to see and understand the contribution of the company's employees to open source products.
Andrew Kopeiko.
Post will be updated as information becomes available.
Source: habr.com