Maxim Dounin announces the freenginx project.
As such, starting from today, I will no longer participate in nginx development as run by F5. Instead, I’m starting an alternative project, which is going to be run by developers, and not corporate entities:
The name of this project is a death sentence. F5 owns the NGINX trademark. A successful fork of this will need to have a new name.
When Oracle ruined Hudson, the community forked it and renamed it to Jenkins, and Oracle lost their investment. The same should be possible with NGINX (BSD vs. MIT, IANAL).
He’s russian. Trademarks and copyright doesn’t matter.
That might be true inside Russia, but not in the rest of the world. F5 could sue in the US and force the registrar responsible for the .org TLD to hand the domain to them.
In his place, I would chosen something related but different enough to avoid trademark infringement, like “Freeginx”. IANAL, but I believe sometimes all it takes is one letter to keep lawyers away.
IMO he would have been better off reversing the letters to something like XNGIN2 or some other clever play on the old theme.
Besides the new name being problematic it’s plain aweful.
Feels like Gentoo ==> Funtoo – Gentoo is a infinitely better name IMO.