NGINX Office Raided by Russian Police – Co-Founders and Employees Detained

Russian police have raided the Nginx office at Moscow, detained the employees of the company, the original developer Igor Sysoev, and another co-founder Maxim Konovalov.

Police raid in #Nginx Moscow office.
Several employees, including chief developer and co-owner Igor Sysoev, have been arrested.

The searches are due to complaints filed by Rambler Group against NGINX. Rambler claims that Sysoev developed the open-source Nginx web server when he was working as a system administrator in Rambler.

Nginx Office Raided

Nginx webserver was publicly released in the year 2004, it is free open-source software and can be also used as a reverse proxy or load balancer. The latest stable version is Nginx 1.16.1.

Igor Sysoev said that he developed Nginx “aiming to overcome certain barriers of scaling the web infrastructure difficulties in handling many concurrent connections, reducing latency and offloading static content, SSL and persistent connections.”

Nginx, Inc was formed in the year 2011, aimed to provide support and for supplying Nginx plus paid software. In 2019 NGINX was acquired by F5 Networks for $670 million. According to the w3techs report, Nginx is used by more than 30% of the websites including gainst like Facebook, Netflix and Apple.

Rambler group claims that Igor Sysoev started the development of NGINX when he was an employee in Rambler Internet Holding company, so “therefore any use of this program without the consent of the Rambler Group is a violation of the exclusive right.”

Seems like Rambler filled copyright claim to @isysoev regarding @nginx, nginx office under police raid (unconfirmed). Originally posted by @igorippolitov , but somebody asked him to remove his post. pic.twitter.com/76mBNtV31G

— Anton Nesterov (@AntNesterov) December 12, 2019

Igor Sysoev said in an Interviews at Hacker magazine in 2012 that he developed NGINX in free hours while working in Rambler, he also told that “programming was not part of my job responsibilities in Rambler.”

Rambler also claimed that Sysoev worked on the Nginx project during working hours, then he distributed the web server software on the Internet freely, later the rights owned by Nginx Inc. Rambler said, this agreement and free distribution is illegal and it costs damage estimated at 51.4 million rubles ($820,000).

According to the Forbes report the case has been failed under Part 3 of Article 146, which leads to 6 years of imprisonment, with fines up to 500,000 rubles.