Igor Ashmanov, Rambler's former CEO refutes the claims that Sysoyev used his job hours and Rambler's resources to develop nginx, whereas his 'vacant time' would start after leaving the office. The following is a translation from Russian of his remarks:
'1. That's bullshit. Our legislation lacks things like this. One has to prove this deliberately; an employee would have a specific task to be assigned to him. 'Using company resources' or 'during the job time' - no, doesn't work. Everything's permitted, and the author retains his intellectual property rights.
2. Besides, upon Sysoyev's employment - and it was me who hired him in 2000, - we'd had an express term that he had his own project and full rights to keep working on it. It was called like mod_accel at the time, Nginx name showed up in circa 2001-2002.
I can testify this in court if necessary. And my partner at Ashmanov and Partners and Kribrum, Dmitri Pashko, Rambler's technical director at that time, and Sysoyev's immediate boss - would do the same, I think.
3. Sysoyev worked as a sysadmin at Rambler. He was never tasked with developing any software there at all.
4. I guess, Rambler has zero documents pertaining to the matter, aside from a non-existent tech task to develop a web-server. '
It's almost amusing to see this, in fact, given Ashmanov's usual stance.
Problem is that with Russian courts it's not the claims' validity that defines their merit and the eventual outcome of a trial.
Russian Sberbank, one of the largest banks in Russia, and essentially a government-controlled entity, has acquired 46.5% share at Rambler earlier this year, as such becoming one of just three stakeholders (Alexandr Mamut has another 46.5%, 7% are with Ekaterina Lapshina's Era Capital). This makes Rambler a pretty much gov't-controlled entity too. And this attack on nginx looks pretty much state-backed.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
