Yes, nginx was always free software. The company nginx was set up to support it on a similar business model to Redhat with Linux, or Covalent with Apache.
Indeed, you can see other commonality. Just as certain Silicon Valley bigcos have packaged and supported Apache, so Taobao has its own nginx-derivative tengine. Fully API-compatible but with some extra goodies the Taobao folks wanted. I expect there's two-way traffic between the two, though until nginx backports tengine's support for loadable modules, the latter has the edge as a developer platform.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
