

Nginx established as a company - rplnt
http://nginx.org/#2011-07-18

======
markbao
This is incredible news. Congratulations to Igor and the rest of the nginx
team.

Does anyone know if the model of open-source with a consulting/premium support
company behind it works? I've paid 10gen for MongoDB assistance before, so I
know there has to be some legitimacy behind the model. And, you know, MySQL.

~~~
jcsalterego
Other working examples:

* Percona: MySQL

* Canonical: Ubuntu

* Best Practical: RT

* Concurrent: Cascading

* Basho: Riak

~~~
beatpanda
Automattic: WordPress

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wensing
Ah, now that is better news than 1,000 TC funding articles.

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nginxorg
Thank you all for most kind and warm responses. Lots of work to do to make
nginx an even better foss product.

~~~
jason_slack
Igor, I wanted to say Thank You, but not contact info on your website and I
figured using Who-IS to get a contact address would be weird.....

~~~
nginxorg
Thanks! Igor's email is actually quite simple. You take igor then add this @
then his surname and it all is ending in dot ru :) If it's all too
complicated, follow us @nginxorg and I will DM Igor's contact. Alternatively
there's an active list here <http://nginx.org/mailman/listinfo/nginx>

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powertower
I really wish he would not throw away Windows as a platform, considering
Apache.org win32 builds make up more than 50% of their downloads. Even MySQL
downloads in 2009 where something like 60% win32 and that was 2 years ago.

There is so much potential here that not having good Windows builds basically
means you're missing out an extra 30% of production systems and 70% of
development system. As in: you could double your numbers easily.

It's extra adaptation and growth.

*Windows builds exist. <http://nginx.org/en/docs/windows.html>

~~~
__rkaup__
"...considering Apache.org win32 builds make up more than 50% of their
downloads."

That's not very accurate. On any other platform, you use a package manager to
install Apache.

~~~
sixtofour
I wonder what percentage of *nix Apache and Nginx users, where a managed
package is available, still download and build from source.

~~~
St-Clock
I believe nginx users are more likely to build nginx from source than apache
considering that nginx modules need to be specified at compile time and the
more you add modules, the more your performance might suffer (unless this has
changed lately).

This is probably why there are many nginx packages in ubuntu repositories
(nginx-light, nginx-full, etc.).

------
powertower
Author of G-WAN webserver had this to say:

    
    
      I have been fascinated by Igor's code, its rigor, its almost *geometric nature*...
    

[http://forum.gwan.com/index.php?p=/discussion/comment/1272/#...](http://forum.gwan.com/index.php?p=/discussion/comment/1272/#Comment_1272)

~~~
rrrazdan
I was reading some of his other comments. He came across as a particularly
"interesting" guy. He also claims that NSA has had access to quantum computers
since the 90s. My observation is just to qualify your statement.

~~~
sovande
He come across as a fruit basket if you ask me; Conspiracy theories aside,
when he dissed libevent and libev[1] on his own forum [2], the author of libev
took time to reply and it became pretty apparent that this guy does not know a
whole of lot of what he is talking about. He has also taken several stabs at
Igor and Nginx and when Igor politely pointed out that g-wan actually use more
syscalls than nginx for the same request - meaning that g-wan user-land code
basically does nothing since it apparently is faster than nginx, he went on a
crazy rampant trying to explain away the fact.

[1] Libev is the event engine used by node.js.

[2]
[http://forum.gwan.com/index.php?p=/discussion/151/libevent-a...](http://forum.gwan.com/index.php?p=/discussion/151/libevent-
and-libev-benchmarks-vs-g-wan-flame-war/p1)

~~~
Meai
I have no expertise in these areas, but let me point out that you didn't give
an example of where you got the idea that the gwan author was not
knowledgeable enough. If this was so apparent to you, then it should be easy
to enumerate your concerns. In addition the gwan author continues to release
detailed benchmarks against all competitors, in which Gwan always leads. Nginx
and others do not do that. I don't know what your criticism is supposed to
accomplish, but I hardly think the number of syscalls matters when Gwan is
still faster. I'm not defending the guy and certainly not his attitude but I
just don't agree with how you laid out your criticism.

~~~
sovande
The number of syscalls most definitely matters. Syscalls define what the
application actually does on the system. Whenever an application opens a file,
write or read it is a syscall. Syscalls are expensive and if you want to write
a fast server you want to minimize these calls as much as possible.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syscall>

The author of gwan sits behind his closed source application and use
benchmarks "authoritatively" to criticize open source competitors. This is
very bad form as there is no way for these authors to investigate and
criticize the gwan code in return.

However, one can use trace to investigate the number of syscalls gwan uses for
a known operation (e.g. serving a small static file). If gwan was the fastest
server out there one would of course expect that it uses the fewest and
absolute minimum number of syscalls of all servers. When it turns out that it
doesn't, the author of gwan has a explanation problem.

Add to the above premise that gwan does not implement HTTP/1.1 and hardly does
HTTP/1.0.

Before we conclude, lets look at what a web-server or application server does.
The following abstract loop basically define such a server:

    
    
       while true
             read request
             <process>
             write response
       end
    

If you skip or minimize the <process> part, any newbie programmer can write a
server that can handle a large amount of requests per second. And this is
exactly what gwan does, while the other servers implements the full HTTP/1.1
state machine. It is in the <process> part that the work of a server, skills
and excellence can be found.

Gwan is a classic example of "The Emperor Wears No Clothes" and the so-called
benchmarks are a joke as it compares a naked gwan with a magnificent clothed
emperor such as nginx.

------
jdp23
Congrats! nginx has been such a great success so far, very exciting to see you
take it to the next level!

------
michaelschade
Incredible news indeed–congrats nginx team! Looking forward to their focus on
new features.

------
newman314
I sure hope this gives Igor the time and cycles to implement SPDY now.

------
someone13
In a slightly related vein, does anyone know if there's an official "donate"
page? For all the help that nginx has been, I'd happily contribute some money
to the author(s).

~~~
markbao

        If you like to donate to nginx, you can make a donation via
        
        PayPal
        paypal@nginx.net
    

<http://sysoev.ru/en/donation.html>

~~~
gravitronic
Hmm.. maybe I'm wrong, but doesn't paypal disallow non-charities from
collecting donations? And they often end up freezing the account?

Here's the link stating that google checkout does not allow "donations" unless
you're tax-exempt:
[http://www.reddit.com/comments/gx7br/google_emulates_paypal_...](http://www.reddit.com/comments/gx7br/google_emulates_paypal_keeps_donations_intended/)

I can't find the related news article for paypal offhand.

~~~
dotBen
Given that anyone donating is presumably using nginx somewhere would be very
easy for them to restructure this as _"paying a voluntary license for the use
of nginx at a $ amount to be decided by the customer"_

~~~
gravitronic
They should do that and avoid the pain of a paypal frozen account.

------
RocknRolla
congratz guys (if you read this)

getting money flowing for dev of Nginx can only benefit the FOSS community.
Hopefully some of that money will go into developing more documentation :)

~~~
nginxorg
it will, it will :)

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shapeshed
congratulations! nginx is a great piece of software

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fedd
i am proud for the guys and have a sort of white envy (if there is such a
notion)

i was flattered when once somebody called our "vsetec mety" project an nginx
of databases. though it's definetely not true (even maybe vice versa)...

------
aclark
Congrats! Very excited to hear this.

