Posts by JourneymanD

Cops storm Nginx's Moscow offices after a Russian biz claims it owns world's most widely used web server, not F5

Re: Nah

Russian legislations suggests that unless you've been specifically assigned to perform a certain task (including developing anything) whatever you have created is yours alone automatically.

This claim is a mistake.

Rambler wasn't even the first user of this server, Zvuki.ru was, a decades-old and still pretty much active music encyclopedia/media portal. It still runs on nginx, btw.

Besides, Rambler had never claimed any ownership to nginx until right now; and nginx always had been copyrighted to mr. Sysoyev, and nobody bothered (again, until now).

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.

Germany gives social networks 24 hours to delete criminal content

Possibly incorrect translation

Greetings, Registers

It looks there's a mistake in the translation (Google Translation does bad job here, indeed).

The line "Dazu zählen z.B. Beleidigung, üble Nachrede, Verleumdung, öffentliche Aufforderung zu Straftaten, Volksverhetzung und Bedrohung" is more likely translated as following:

"These include, for instance, insults, libel, slander, public calls for crimes, rabble-housing and threats."

Just decided to check every word, since "public prosecution" seems illogical here.