Recent events compel us to take a stance on the news surrounding the Nginx project. At Yandex, we believe that a modern internet is impossible without open source culture and the people who invest their time in developing open-source software.
Judge for yourselves: we all use open-source browsers, receive pages from open-source servers, which run on open-source OS. Openness is not the only feature of these programs, but undoubtedly one of the most important. In fact, most of the properties of these programs have emerged because developers from around the world could read their code and suggest appropriate changes. The flexibility, speed, and customizability of open-source software is what enables the modern internet to improve daily through the efforts of thousands of programmers worldwide.
Open-source programs come into being in various ways – sometimes it’s a bold individual writing code for pleasure at home, while other times it involves the work of an entire company that supports code openness. But even in the latter case, it’s always not just a team, but a specific person, a leader, creating the project. Everyone probably knows how Linux came to be thanks to Linus Torvalds. Mikael Widenius probably created the most popular database among web developers, MySQL, and Michael Stonebraker with a team from Berkeley created PostgreSQL. At Google, Jeff Dean developed TensorFlow. Yandex has similar examples: Andrey Gulin and Anna Veronica Dorogush created the first version of CatBoost, and Alexey Milovidov launched the development of ClickHouse and gathered a development community around the project. We are very pleased that these developments now essentially belong to a vast community of developers from different countries and companies. Another source of our collective pride is Nginx – a project by Igor Sysoev, undoubtedly the most well-known Russian open-source project. Today, Nginx serves more than 30% of all internet pages and is used by almost all major internet companies.
Programs with open-source licenses do not generate profits by themselves. Of course, there are many examples of building businesses around open-source: for instance, RedHat, which built a massive public company based on the support of its Linux distribution, or MySQL AB, which provided paid support for the open-source MySQL database. However, the main focus of open source is not business, but rather building a strong open product that is improved by the global community.
Open source is the foundation for the rapid development of internet technologies. It is essential that a wide range of developers remain motivated to share their developments in open source, thereby collectively solving complex challenges. Persecution for open source is a very negative signal to the programming community. We firmly believe that all technology companies should support and nurture the open-source movement.
Source: habr.com
