The events of recent days force us to state our position on the news around the Nginx project. We at Yandex believe that the modern Internet is impossible without an open source culture and people who invest their time in the development of open source programs.
Judge for yourself: we all use open source browsers, get pages from an open source server that runs on an open source OS. Openness is not the only property of these programs, but certainly one of the most important. In fact, most of the properties of these programs came from the fact that developers from all over the world could read their code and suggest suitable changes. The flexibility, speed, and customizability of open source programs is what allows the modern Internet to be improved daily by thousands of programmers around the world.
Open source software comes in many forms - sometimes it's a sassy loner who writes code for his own pleasure at home, and sometimes it's the work of an entire company supporting open source code. But even in the latter case, it is always not only and not so much a team, but a specific person, a leader who creates a project. Everyone probably knows how Linux appeared thanks to Linus Torvalds. Mikael Widenius created perhaps the most popular database among web developers, MySQL, and Michael Stonebreaker and the Berkeley team created PostgreSQL. At Google Corporation, Jeff Dean created TensorFlow. Yandex also has such examples: Andrey Gulin and Anna Veronika Dorogush, who created the first version of CatBoost, and Aleksey Milovidov, who launched ClickHouse development and gathered the development community around the project. And we are very glad that these developments now essentially belong to a huge community of developers from different countries and companies. The same subject of our common pride is Nginx, a project by Igor Sysoev, which is definitely the most famous Russian open source project. Today, Nginx serves more than 30% of the pages of the entire Internet and is used by almost all major Internet companies.
By themselves, open source software is not profitable. Of course, there are many examples of building a business around open source: for example, RedHat, which built a huge public company on the support of its Linux distribution, or MySQL AB, which provided paid support for the open MySQL database. But still, the main thing in open source is not business, but building a strong open product that is being improved by the whole world.
Open source is the basis for the rapid development of Internet technologies. It is important that a wide range of developers remain motivated to put their developments in open source and, thereby, jointly solve complex problems. The persecution of open source is a very bad signal to the programming community. We absolutely believe that all technology companies should support and develop the open source movement.
Source: habr.com