Police raid Nginx office in Moscow over copyright claims

Russian authorities raided Nginx’s Moscow office and seized equipment. Two employees, the two founders, were also arrested and questioned.

In addition to founder and CTO Igor Sysoev, co-founder Maxim Konovalov has been arrested and taken in for questioning. F5 Networks, owner of Nginx Inc since March this year. confirmed the raid against ZDNet after staff members posted here on Twitter about messages.

The raid happened Thursday, a week after the Rambler Group claimed Nginx infringed its copyrights with the web server software. The Rambler Group is the company behind a popular Russian search engine and portal, rambler.ru.

The founder of Nginx, Igor Sysoev, previously worked as a system administrator at Rambler and developed the web server software there around 2000. According to Rambler, it is therefore the full owner of Nginx. Sysoev has never made it a secret that he developed Nginx during his job at Rambler, but according to him, he did so in his spare time and Rambler initially had no interest in it. According to him, the software was first deployed at other sites such as Rate.ee and zvuki.ru.

Sysoev made Nginx open source in 2004 and founded Nginx Inc in 2009. op, a company with headquarters in San Francisco and now several offices worldwide. The web server software has a market share of 38 percent, according to Netcraft.