<story><title>Nginx, Inc. announces its Series A funding</title><url>http://nginx.net/nginx-venture-funding.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pilif</author><text>I&apos;m really happy for nginx to get the recognition that it deserves and I&apos;d love nothing more than see the people behind it being able to make a living doing nothing but nginx.&lt;p&gt;But when I read about funding, about founding a real corporation and everything else that&apos;s going on, I&apos;m afraid that at one point, nginx will do a MySQL and become open-core.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s not that I&apos;m not willing to pay for software in general, but I would love to have flexibility when I&apos;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.&lt;p&gt;This is one of the main reasons, I prefer my infrastructure to be open source.&lt;p&gt;&quot;But, open-core is also open source&quot;, 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&apos;s &quot;tainted&quot; by a &quot;better&quot; enterprise edition.&lt;p&gt;Also, often times, submitted patches would not get accepted because the submitted feature is conflicting with an enterprise-feature - maybe even just one that&apos;s planned for somewhere in the future.&lt;p&gt;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 &quot;open&quot; edition to nothing more than a trial version.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;Let&apos;s hope that a pure support-based revenue model is going to work out for them.&lt;p&gt;(edit: nginx is released under a very liberal license, so it&apos;s entirely thinkable that, nginx would be OpenSSH&apos;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)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>temphn</author><text>Hmmm. You only think they should make a living?&lt;p&gt;I would hope most of us would want Igor Sysoev to at least put $10-$100m in the bank. He has easily created that much value over the past few years for hundreds if not thousands of companies.&lt;p&gt;If it turns out that nginx becomes less usable, or the free version becomes too expensive, a competitor will crop up. But we should want people who are gods of open source to figure out business models that enable them to become richly rewarded, and not just make a living. Maybe that&apos;s open-core, maybe it&apos;s a talent/showcase acquisition by Google or Facebook (as opposed to Oracle), but we should want these guys to become quite wealthy to inspire people.</text></comment>
<story><title>Nginx, Inc. announces its Series A funding</title><url>http://nginx.net/nginx-venture-funding.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pilif</author><text>I&apos;m really happy for nginx to get the recognition that it deserves and I&apos;d love nothing more than see the people behind it being able to make a living doing nothing but nginx.&lt;p&gt;But when I read about funding, about founding a real corporation and everything else that&apos;s going on, I&apos;m afraid that at one point, nginx will do a MySQL and become open-core.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s not that I&apos;m not willing to pay for software in general, but I would love to have flexibility when I&apos;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.&lt;p&gt;This is one of the main reasons, I prefer my infrastructure to be open source.&lt;p&gt;&quot;But, open-core is also open source&quot;, 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&apos;s &quot;tainted&quot; by a &quot;better&quot; enterprise edition.&lt;p&gt;Also, often times, submitted patches would not get accepted because the submitted feature is conflicting with an enterprise-feature - maybe even just one that&apos;s planned for somewhere in the future.&lt;p&gt;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 &quot;open&quot; edition to nothing more than a trial version.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;Let&apos;s hope that a pure support-based revenue model is going to work out for them.&lt;p&gt;(edit: nginx is released under a very liberal license, so it&apos;s entirely thinkable that, nginx would be OpenSSH&apos;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)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>For_Iconoclasm</author><text>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&apos;t. Nginx&apos;s history of being the lightweight, faster competitor to Apache (a shining example of success in the open source world) practically defines its identity.&lt;p&gt;I just hope that nginx doesn&apos;t sell out. I don&apos;t think it will, because I can&apos;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.</text></comment>