Nginx, Inc. announces its Series A funding
nginx.net
nginx.net
But when I read about funding, about founding a real corporation and everything else that's going on, I'm afraid that at one point, nginx will do a MySQL and become open-core.
It's not that I'm not willing to pay for software in general, but I would love to have flexibility when I'm chosing my infrastructure. If the need for an additional server arises, I want to just start it and not matter about buying licenses and entering keys.
This is one of the main reasons, I prefer my infrastructure to be open source.
"But, open-core is also open source", you might say, but none of these projects ever end up getting a good community behind them. Many talented people would not sign a CLA and they would not want to invest their time into something that's "tainted" by a "better" enterprise edition.
Also, often times, submitted patches would not get accepted because the submitted feature is conflicting with an enterprise-feature - maybe even just one that's planned for somewhere in the future.
So in the end most of these open-core projects are exclusively developed by the same people who do the enterprise version and have a vested interest in selling enterprise licenses, degrading the "open" edition to nothing more than a trial version.
I would hate to see this happen to nginx. Not because there are no open alternatives (there are), but because nginx is elegant, fun to work with, fast and, above all, stable.
Let's hope that a pure support-based revenue model is going to work out for them.
(edit: nginx is released under a very liberal license, so it's entirely thinkable that, nginx would be OpenSSH'd: OpenSSH AFAIR started as a fork of the last Free version of ssh. And now just look where OpenSSH stands compared to non-free ssh)
I just hope that nginx doesn't sell out. I don't think it will, because I can't see what it has to gain for becoming exactly like its competitors when it already has a substantial user base. Of course, as you stated, dividing the userbase between enterprise edition users and free edition users could cause some software development political issues that could stifle progress.
http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2009-2629
Not sure if this poses any real danger in practice, but still -- better be safe than sorry.
[1] http://forum.nginx.org/read.php?27,215419,215419#msg-215419
There are also a ton of bug fixes related to CPU hogging and caching that makes it worth upgrading, especially considering how painless it is.
I would hope most of us would want Igor Sysoev to at least put $10-$100m in the bank. He has easily created that much value over the past few years for hundreds if not thousands of companies.
If it turns out that nginx becomes less usable, or the free version becomes too expensive, a competitor will crop up. But we should want people who are gods of open source to figure out business models that enable them to become richly rewarded, and not just make a living. Maybe that's open-core, maybe it's a talent/showcase acquisition by Google or Facebook (as opposed to Oracle), but we should want these guys to become quite wealthy to inspire people.
nginx is one of the best pieces of software ever written.
Igor deserves a truckload of money, and it's good to see him going out on his own instead of being acqui-hired and never seeing the light of day again.
It is very hard to lock down free software if it is something popular or needed.
Wasn't nginx imported into OpenBSD base not too long ago? I imagine worst case scenario they just keep maintaining their version (like they did with apache).
However, I am hopeful for Igor. I have used (and benefitted from) nginx quite a bit. I wish his endeavor the best!
And... they did: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3101896
1) make money from services.
2) make money from products.
If you pick "1" you can do a good, very small company, to get your bills payed, but service companies are hard to scale, and unlikely to grow their value in a short time. This is not what your VCs have in mind, basically.
So you end doing "2" if you are VC-backed. With "2" the only way to get money is to either close part of the software, or to find a different way to provide some product value to the user if the use will pay. And this will make the project weaker one way or the other in the end.
p.s. I need a new fake account.
That is what I'm doing with Redis. If the big company funding the project is as polite as VMware you end with a lot of freedom but the money to just focus only on your project (and not just you, VMware just hired Pieter Noordhuis for instance).
Only disadvantage is that the lead developers are unlikely to get rich, as they are payed to work with a good salary but this is not like a big exit for a startup. But my grandfather and my father always got payed to work, so I trust this model, and I'm not seeking richness, so it's the perfect model for me, but not for everybody.
" But my grandfather and my father always got payed to work, so I trust this model, and I'm not seeking richness "
FYI, the correct spelling in this context is "paid"; the spelling "payed" is only used in a couple very obscure cases which you'll probably never encounter.
(I'm only mentioning it because I'm pretty sure you're not a native English speaker, and I figured you might like to know.)
Then what's your motivation to make the documentation better, and the abstractions easy to understand?
At worst, you could simply believing that you work in an inherently complicated field where people must pay for services and training just to get by.
It depends on your services I suppose, but I don't think it would be especially hard to generate revenue by selling Nginx training and support. A conference, seminars, books, support contracts, etc.
Sadly just having an official company behind it will be enough to get approval to use Nginx in a lot of enterprises--sign a fat support contract so you can cover your ass and not think about it again.
I foresee that plugin writers and source contributors will slowly creep towards the consulting and support model, while the 'community' or 'core' version users will get scarcer documentation. That's fine by me, but signing that support contract will probably mean paying 2 grand for getting a tailored nginx.conf and an SOW document.
That's a good business opportunity overall, but at what cost to the community ?
Meanwhile the nginx wiki is completely community run and maintained. The nginx company would cripple itself if it ostracised the community behind it.
Or, as in our case (x264), you keep everything open, but open source version is GPL, thus limiting its possible use in proprietary software packages, whereas the commercial version is not (despite them being line-for-line identical).
This only works if the project's license is copyleft, of course.
In my experience this was some effort, but not overwhelmingly so, IMO. This would probably be more difficult for a larger project, but other projects have done similar things (e.g. VLC's planned relicensing of libVLC to LGPL).
Perhaps Nginx can learn from that, and maybe build out some hosted products, like selling self-scaling nginx ami clusters on ec2.
Webservers are a hard business to make money in. Look at Zed Shaw, he built the app server that made Twitter possible, and I'm quite sure he never saw a dime out of it, though it increased his reputation. Likewise Igor hasn't seen money out of nginx yet, but he's built software that also helps enable hundreds of millions of dollars worth of transactions per year of business. He deserves the opportunity to profit on the technology he's shared with the world for free.
1. create something of value, but serious value 2. generate traction, but in a big way 3. go after capturing some of that value.
I like how they move to 3 only when 2 is fulfilled, like half the internet uses their product.
This seems to go against the current trend of first deciding to "do a startup", then figuring out what to do. Reminds me of something PG wrote in an essay about the craigslist way and staying "upwind" of profits.
"Going corporate" will make Nginx feel like less of a hacker's playground, but I think that's OK. Like the Linux kernel in the late Nineties, Nginx has grown up and is stable enough for huge companies to rely on for critical functionality. Now that Nginx has a marketing budget of more than $50, it will be installed on many, many more servers and generally make the web faster and more reliable for everyone. That seems like a great outcome to me.
For that matter, older versions of NginX still work great.
Good luck to their team.
I'd love to know where they got this stat from. I've indexed 130 million domains and 3.1 million of them use Nginx. Don't get me wrong that's an amazing total but if by domains they mean registered web domains (example.com etc..) then I'd love to know how they came to it.
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2011/10/06/october-2011-we...
It indeed shows 43M "hostnames" as of Oct 2011.
The days of Apache are dwindling!