F5 Networks announced that Igor Sysoev, the author of Nginx, has left the company. For nine years, the programmer worked on the creation and development of the project. Unfortunately, the famous product creator is leaving the company when it is on the wave of an unprecedented rise. The product he created is the world's most popular web server. He managed to push aside all competitors, including the famous Apache.
Igor's leave
The author of the successful project left the company without warning. During the twenty years of its existence, the product he created became the most popular in the world. The official website states that the founder decided to leave the company to develop other products. The founder also explains his desire to leave the company to communicate more with his family and friends.
According to statistics on W3Techs at the beginning of January, Nginx accounted for 33% of the global web server market. Apache is in second place with a 31% share. Nginx technology is now used by 374 million sites and portals, including Yandex and Mail.Ru Group, VKontakte, and Netflix.
Creating the web server
The specialist started creating the product in 2002. At that time, he was an employee of Rambler Group. From 2007 to 2011, he worked as a chief system administrator. The developer created and finalized the product on his own; no one else was involved in it. He spent two years developing the project, and in 2004 the first public version was created, which was open-source software. Nginx is free software and distributed under the BSD license. At first, the server was intended for Unix-like systems. However, a build for Windows operating systems was created after some time. Finally, in 2013 a paid version of Nginx Plus was released.
For nine years, a developer alone created and developed a web server. Then, in 2011, he started a company to bring Nginx to the market. Maxim Konovalov became a co-founder. The creator of the product worked with him at Rambler. Maxim is currently not going to leave the company.
Investments
Sysoyev's plan to open a company to bring the project to the market proved successful. From its founding through 2019, the company has raised more than $100 million. In 2011, the project was invested by such investment funds as BV Capital. The co-investors were Runa Capital, E.ventures, and MSL Capital. The amount of all investments was 3 million dollars.
In 2013, another $10 million was invested in the project. The leading investor was New Enterprise Associates, and the co-investors were all of the companies, as mentioned earlier. In addition, Box.com founder Aaron Levy joined them.
In 2014, investments in the project increased by another $20 million. Telstra Venture, NEA, e.venture, Runa Capital, and Index Ventures became investors. Two years later, they invested another $8 million.
Change of ownership and Rambler attack
Igor and Maksim no longer owned the company in spring 2019. Instead, it was acquired by F5 Networks, purchasing Nginx for $670 million.
Under the terms of the sale, the Nginx brand was retained, and Igor and Maxim continued to work on the server as part of F5. In addition, the CEO of Nginx remained Gus Robertson, who joined the company in April 2013.
At the end of 2019, Internet users of a famous Russian web server got an unpleasant surprise. Rambler announced that it owned the rights to Nginx and did everything possible to take it away from its creators. The company claimed that its exclusive rights to the product had been violated. At the same time, the rights to this product were transferred to Lynwood Investments. Rambler representatives said that the developer created the project as part of his job duties, and he used Rambler infrastructure to create his product.
Law enforcement officers searched the Moscow office of the company. At the end of 2020, the case on the rights to this project was closed, as the internal affairs bodies did not find any corpus delicti.
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