
Nginx, Inc. announces its Series A funding - tbassetto
http://nginx.net/nginx-venture-funding.html
======
pilif
I'm really happy for nginx to get the recognition that it deserves and I'd
love nothing more than see the people behind it being able to make a living
doing nothing but nginx.

But when I read about funding, about founding a real corporation and
everything else that's going on, I'm afraid that at one point, nginx will do a
MySQL and become open-core.

It's not that I'm not willing to pay for software in general, but I would love
to have flexibility when I'm chosing my infrastructure. If the need for an
additional server arises, I want to just start it and not matter about buying
licenses and entering keys.

This is one of the main reasons, I prefer my infrastructure to be open source.

"But, open-core is also open source", you might say, but none of these
projects ever end up getting a good community behind them. Many talented
people would not sign a CLA and they would not want to invest their time into
something that's "tainted" by a "better" enterprise edition.

Also, often times, submitted patches would not get accepted because the
submitted feature is conflicting with an enterprise-feature - maybe even just
one that's planned for somewhere in the future.

So in the end most of these open-core projects are exclusively developed by
the same people who do the enterprise version and have a vested interest in
selling enterprise licenses, degrading the "open" edition to nothing more than
a trial version.

I would hate to see this happen to nginx. Not because there are no open
alternatives (there are), but because nginx is elegant, fun to work with, fast
and, above all, stable.

Let's hope that a pure support-based revenue model is going to work out for
them.

(edit: nginx is released under a very liberal license, so it's entirely
thinkable that, nginx would be OpenSSH'd: OpenSSH AFAIR started as a fork of
the last Free version of ssh. And now just look where OpenSSH stands compared
to non-free ssh)

~~~
For_Iconoclasm
I feel the same way. Nginx has been the little ngin that could, supported by a
bunch of talented hackers dedicated to bringing something to the table that
the big-time servers, even the open source ones, couldn't. Nginx's history of
being the lightweight, faster competitor to Apache (a shining example of
success in the open source world) practically defines its identity.

I just hope that nginx doesn't sell out. I don't think it will, because I
can't see what it has to gain for becoming exactly like its competitors when
it already has a substantial user base. Of course, as you stated, dividing the
userbase between enterprise edition users and free edition users could cause
some software development political issues that could stifle progress.

~~~
pork
Nginx is one of those rare products where I felt no need to upgrade from the
now-ancient 0.7.6 version because _it just does everything I need well_. Truly
an amazing little piece of code, on par (in my books) with venerable oldies
like qmail.

~~~
przemoc
I almost agree, i.e. second-level-legacy 0.7.x line is good enough for most of
web needs, so indeed there is no really strong urge to upgrade to the current
stable, though some nice features came later. What I do not agree is keeping
really old 0.7.6 instead of upgrading to safer and more stable 0.7.6y (and if
you do, going to the latest 0.7.69 is obviously the best solution).

~~~
protagonist_h
Upgrading to at least the latest minor version (0.7.6y as you say) may indeed
be a good idea since there have been some security vulnerabilities discovered
e.g.

<http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2009-2629>

Not sure if this poses any real danger in practice, but still -- better be
safe than sorry.

------
fletcher
I don't trust this model, since when building a company that's based on open
source software you have just two business models available:

1) make money from services.

2) make money from products.

If you pick "1" you can do a good, very small company, to get your bills
payed, but service companies are hard to scale, and unlikely to grow their
value in a short time. This is not what your VCs have in mind, basically.

So you end doing "2" if you are VC-backed. With "2" the only way to get money
is to either close part of the software, or to find a different way to provide
some product value to the user _if_ the use will pay. And this will make the
project weaker one way or the other in the end.

p.s. I need a new fake account.

~~~
antirez
Model number 3:

That is what I'm doing with Redis. If the big company funding the project is
as polite as VMware you end with a lot of freedom but the money to just focus
only on your project (and not just you, VMware just hired Pieter Noordhuis for
instance).

Only disadvantage is that the lead developers are unlikely to get rich, as
they are payed to work with a good salary but this is not like a big exit for
a startup. But my grandfather and my father always got payed to work, so I
trust this model, and I'm not seeking richness, so it's the perfect model for
me, but not for everybody.

~~~
Hitchhiker
Amazed to see the author of hping2 here .. ah that was a different era ;-)

~~~
krookoo
I remmeber him from his tcl days and I love the guy.

~~~
Hitchhiker
this shows an amazing value system:

" But my grandfather and my father always got payed to work, so I trust this
model, and I'm not seeking richness "

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lkozma
I really love the way these guys go about things:

1\. create something of value, but serious value 2\. generate traction, but in
a big way 3\. go after capturing some of that value.

I like how they move to 3 only when 2 is fulfilled, like half the internet
uses their product.

This seems to go against the current trend of first deciding to "do a
startup", then figuring out what to do. Reminds me of something PG wrote in an
essay about the craigslist way and staying "upwind" of profits.

------
EvanMiller
I think this is great news. I remember the excitement of first discovering
Nginx back in 2006 and realizing that the world's most popular web server
(Apache) was based on inferior technology. Here was this unknown proxy server
written by one guy in Russia, but inside the well-structured, completely
undocumented code base was the power to serve almost all the world's web
traffic. And he was always more than happy to respond to dumb questions on the
mailing list and incorrect patches to his personal account.

"Going corporate" will make Nginx feel like less of a hacker's playground, but
I think that's OK. Like the Linux kernel in the late Nineties, Nginx has grown
up and is stable enough for huge companies to rely on for critical
functionality. Now that Nginx has a marketing budget of more than $50, it will
be installed on many, many more servers and generally make the web faster and
more reliable for everyone. That seems like a great outcome to me.

------
arkitaip
Suddenly I'm very glad that there's competition and other open source
alternatives on the web server market.

~~~
angelbob
Don't worry. Apache isn't going anywhere any time soon.

For that matter, older versions of NginX still work _great_.

------
przemoc
So now what? Commercial nginx with WebDAV support for all those serious
companies using SVN? It doesn't require as much as $3M, or does it? :)

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sixtofour
I don't know when nginx.com/net came to be, but it's a much nicer site than
nginx.org. Almost corporate looking.

Good luck to their team.

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garazy
"Today NGINX powers over 40,000,000 domains on the Internet"

I'd love to know where they got this stat from. I've indexed 130 million
domains and 3.1 million of them use Nginx. Don't get me wrong that's an
amazing total but if by domains they mean registered web domains (example.com
etc..) then I'd love to know how they came to it.

~~~
protagonist_h
This number probably comes from NetCraft Web Server Survey:

[http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2011/10/06/october-2011-we...](http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2011/10/06/october-2011-web-
server-survey.html)

It indeed shows 43M "hostnames" as of Oct 2011.

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renownedmedia
This is really awesome... I didn't even know they had a real company, I
thought it was just another open source entity. Can't wait to see the awesome
software they produce!

The days of Apache are dwindling!

~~~
philf
I think the company was founded in July. So it's a relatively recent
development.

