The future of Nginx?

CyberCr33p

CyberCr33p

Just received this e-mail in Nginx mailing list:

Hello!

As you probably know, F5 closed Moscow office in 2022, and I no
longer work for F5 since then. Still, we’ve reached an agreement
that I will maintain my role in nginx development as a volunteer.
And for almost two years I was working on improving nginx and
making it better for everyone, for free.

Unfortunately, some new non-technical management at F5 recently
decided that they know better how to run open source projects. In
particular, they decided to interfere with security policy nginx
uses for years, ignoring both the policy and developers’ position.

That’s quite understandable: they own the project, and can do
anything with it, including doing marketing-motivated actions,
ignoring developers position and community. Still, this
contradicts our agreement. And, more importantly, I no longer able
to control which changes are made in nginx within F5, and no longer
see nginx as a free and open source project developed and
maintained for the public good.

As such, starting from today, I will no longer participate in nginx
development as run by F5. Instead, I’m starting an alternative
project, which is going to be run by developers, and not corporate
entities:

http://freenginx.org/

The goal is to keep nginx development free from arbitrary corporate
actions. Help and contributions are welcome. Hope it will be
beneficial for everyone.


--
Maxim Dounin
Click to expand...
 
Also:

angie.software

About

An efficient, powerful, and scalable web server, forked from nginx by some of its former devs to extend the functionality far beyond the original.
angie.software angie.software

– via:

Chris Hessert ?? ?? (@chessert@mastodon.online)

@nixCraft@mastodon.social There's another group of Nginx developers that forked off earlier, and already have a product: Angie. Someone posted this earlier on another thread about this. https://angie.software/en/
mastodon.online mastodon.online
 
Note : I use nginx because it's easier to configure compared to apache.
But it smells like F5 is killing the original nginx ?
Cfr. all Microsoft's hostile take-overs...
Note : some companies don't want to create useful products but gain market-share [by any means possible]
 
The fork was created just because of a disagreement over a CVE. The developer thought the CVE was without merit just because the vulnerable code in question needs the experimental flag.

I don't see any future for it.
 
Mostly there is some deeper reason. Which persons won't explain/tells us. Like different goals/interests. At least it proves there is a lack of communication which can prevent these kind of things.
But the 3 : nginx/freenginx/angie also means the limited opensource resources will be divided. As a simple end-user, may the best win.
 
Big projects that support infrastructure often need a benefactor.

I thought this interesting:

We asked Dounin why he started a separate fork, rather than working with Angie. He told us: "Angie shares the same problem as Nginx run by F5: it's run by a for-profit corporate entity. Even if it's good enough now, things might change unexpectedly, like what happened with F5."
Click to expand...
https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/16/freenginx_fork/ (same article linked by grahamperrin).

I don't understand why F5 bought nginx. Was it profitable? Did they gain revenue? Or was it more of a branding / marketing ploy?

This is almost like a NetBSD / OpenBSD split where Doinin plays the part of Theo.

The stock price for F5 dropped off two years ago but is slowly recovering (Yahoo! finance).

finance.yahoo.com

FFIV Interactive Stock Chart | F5, Inc. Stock - Yahoo Finance

At Yahoo Finance, you get free stock quotes, up-to-date news, portfolio management resources, international market data, social interaction and mortgage rates that help you manage your financial life.
finance.yahoo.com finance.yahoo.com
 
Via the banner at <https://nginx.org/en/download.html>:

Meetup Recap: NGINX’s Commitments to the Open Source Community - NGINX (2024-02-13)

… Our goal at NGINX is to continue to be an open source standard, similar to OpenSSL and Linux. Our open source projects are sponsored by F5 and, up until now, have been largely supported by paid employees of F5 with limited contributions from the community. While this has served our projects well, we believe that long-term success hinges on engaging a much larger and diverse community of contributors. …
Click to expand...


OT, I sometimes use F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager, with Windows (no longer possible with FreeBSD).
 
It is open source to the moment (version) of the deal. After that all new versions can be closed source. Old version will be available as open source but 5-10 years later it will be obsolete. Now there is free open source version of Nginx and another version Nginx Plus with additional features which is not open source. About "who got the money" - this is the copyright holder NGINX, Inc. Open source does not always mean public domain, still there is copyright.
 
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Sounds like a mysql and mariadb story.
Some company pays the ownership of something that is free with the goal of getting profits from it in the future.
Happens all the time, it's named capitalism.
 
2.5 admins podcast had a good episode analyzing the fork.

The high-level public information is that a prominent developer disagrees with recent management changes. The specific instance given is that the management wanted to issue a CVE, and the developer wanted to treat the issue as a normal bug. 2.5 admins analysis was that it's usually the other way around - developers wanting to be transparent, management wanting to sweep things under the rug / not disrupt users. So they don't have much sympathy for this developer, at least on the merits of the publicly available information.
 
Alain De Vos said:
Question : Is angie better or worse than nginx ?
Click to expand...

I've been running angie for several months on my own servers and started to install it instead of nginx on company servers a while ago for new installations.
I really don't want to comment on "which one is better" - they both work perfectly fine for what they should do. Angie is a drop-in replacement, yet seems to have some features already 'finished' and enabled by default which are still marked as 'experimental' in nginx or only available (or 'non-experimental') in the commercial variant.
The configuration changes are highlighted via warnings if you start angie with an nginx config file (which usually works right away after a quick 's/nginx/angie/g' to fix some paths), so adjusting the config file is very easy.

TBH I haven't noticed any differences - as said: both work fine. Given that almost all former core developers of nginx are now working at the angie fork, I suspect it will andvance faster while keeping the original course of nginx. F5 will surely bring in new developers, so it definately won't die in the near future, but it might divert from the original design goals of nginx and they will definitely close more and more modules to make good money with it (this has started quite a while ago).
Regarding freenginx I'm a bit sceptical if it will gain enough traction and especiall manpower to sustain; so for now I'll stay with angie, but I'm open to switch again if there are valid reasons. I suspect they will be (near-)drop-in-replacements for each other for quite a while, so migration will be easy and painless.
 
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