The Rambler company, where Igor Sysoev was employed during the development of the nginx project, , in which it declared its exclusive rights to Nginx. At the Moscow office of Nginx, which was recently sold to F5 Networks for $670 million, search with seizure of documents.
Judging by on the Internet, photographs of the search warrant, a criminal case was opened against former Rambler employees developing Nginx under Part 3 of Art. 146 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (βViolation of copyright and related rightsβ). The accusation is based on the allegation that the development of Nginx was carried out during the working hours of Rambler employees and on behalf of the management of this company. Rambler claims that the employment contract stipulated that the employer retained exclusive rights to developments carried out by company employees.
The product was originally developed as a free project, delivered under a free BSD license, allowing the code to be used in third-party commercial products. Nginx only continued to maintain and refine the existing free code base. In addition, at the time of the creation of nginx and mod_accel, Igor Sysoev worked at Rambler as a system administrator, not a programmer, and it is unlikely that his job responsibilities included software development.
The search warrant states that nginx is the intellectual property of Rambler, which was distributed as a free product illegally, without the knowledge of Rambler and as part of criminal intent. The damage from the publication of nginx is estimated at 51 million rubles.
On from Rambler representatives, the rights to file claims and lawsuits related to NGINX were transferred to the law firm Lynwood Investments CY Ltd, which contacted law enforcement agencies to obtain an assessment of the current situation. Law enforcement Rambler victims and opened a criminal case.
Source: opennet.ru