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Comment by kungfufrog | Hacker News Reader

To me it totally sounds like 'all those features (some bizarrely so) we locked behind a commercial license to extract money from you' has resulted in people looking for alternatives as soon as the use case exceeded the capabilities of the open source version. Kubernetes and the ecosystem is eating their lunch for more complex service mesh deployment scenarios where nginx is basically an interchangeable dumb proxy, and doing it with generally new and free open source products, so here, have some more stuff we've kept gated behind an expensive license/subscription so we can stay relevant.

I don't say this to be ungrateful about what nginx has provided for free, it's great, thank you. But the post also feels like a cynical take about what the value of open source truly is.

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I would put it in a more positive light. Long ago, nginx was excellent providing way more than Apache or other alternatives. Then they added features which were pretty advanced and uncommon behind a pay wall.

Many of those features have gone from fancy to expected, and they transitioned too late to making them open source.

The free product went through a slow decline from excellent to artificially crippled, and they’re changing course, which should be applauded. On top of that they didn’t take away features to cripple their product for money, just what is basically necessary these days is so much more than it was years ago.

I don't disagree with your take. I just find it disheartening that it took what presumably they must perceive as a threat to their revenue stream to start listening to developers/engineers about the role open source can play in their product offering and what effect that might have on the "community" around nginx.

To me it sounds rather par for the course as far as open-source projects going partially paid, no?

I thought nginx gained popularity because of it's, at the time, superior concurrency model.

My web server path has been Apache -> (Varnish) -> Nginx -> Caddy. This outside programming language specific servers like Waitress or Express.js.

I love the fact that Caddy is a single binary I can run for simple use cases without configuration file. Plus the built-in Let’s Encrypt support. Nginx is definitely on defence here unless you need “web scale” servers.

Yeah Caddy's developer experience is unrivaled when it comes to setting up SSL. You don't have to run Certbot or manage certificates manually. If you give it a hostname to proxy to, it just handles certificate management seamlessly in the background.

The real killer feature for me is the Cloudflare module. It allows you to use the acme DNS challenge, which means you can test your SSL setup without exposing your server to the public internet.

certbot has dns plugin for nearly all DNS providers including Route53 and Cloudflare. I have been using LE certs on the nginx server on my developer environment without any issues ,other can copying over the certs.

Certbot is fine, but it’s nice to have that functionality built directly into the reverse proxy as opposed to having to configure and update multiple tools. I would ideally like to see Nginx integrate a subset of Certbot’s feature set into their code base especially given that offloading SSL is one of the primary use cases of Nginx.

To clarify, Caddy absolutely can deal "web scale" as proven by companies like Fathom, Stripe, and many others. (The Go standard library powers many of Google's, Cloudflare's, and Netflix's infrastructure, and Caddy is a relatively thin wrapper over that.)

Also a huge fan of Caddy!!!

Such a smart design and incredibly useful piece of software!

But since we're replying to a comment that's criticial about Nginx's commercialization: Caddy also tried to commercialize, and for some time they got way more criticism for that. Are those concerns no longer applicable?

Yes, no longer applicable. https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/issues/2786

Why do you have so many reverse proxies hooked up to each other? Specially Apache and Nginx? I suppose you're using Caddy for its LetsEncrypt support?

They're talking about a timeline of products that they've used. Not an architecture.

Oh. Ok. Thanks

"Going forward, all NGINX projects will be born and hosted on GitHub because that’s where the developer and open source communities work. [..] We pledge to be more open to contributions, more transparent in our stewardship, and more approachable to the community. We will follow all expected conventions for modern open source work and will be rebuilding our GitHub presence, adding Codes of Conduct to all our projects, and paying close attention to community feedback."

"we recognize that many critical features which developers now view as table stakes are on the wrong side of the paywall for NGINX Open Source and NGINX Plus. For example, DNS service discovery is essential for modern apps. Our promise is to make those critical features free by adding them to NGINX Open Source. We haven’t yet decided on all of the features to move and we want your input. Tell us how to optimize your experience as developers. We are listening."

"The NGINX Kubernetes Gateway is also something of an olive branch we’re extending to the community. We realize it complicated matters when we created both a commercial and an open source Ingress controller for Kubernetes, both different from the community Ingress solution (also built on NGINX). The range of choices confused the community and put us in a bad position.

It’s pretty clear that the Gateway API is going to take the place of the Ingress controller in the Kubernetes architecture. So we are changing our approach and will make the NGINX Kubernetes Gateway – which will be offered only as an open source product – the focal point of our Kubernetes networking efforts (in lockstep with the evolving standard). It will both integrate and extend into other NGINX products and optimize the developer experience on Kubernetes."

It sounds pretty honest and positive to me. And I'm the first person to call bullshit on corporate doublespeak. Most other companies would just put more money into B2B sales rather than courting OSS devs/free users and admitting when their strategy was stupid (actually their language is evasive, but w/e).

Of course hindsight's 20/20; let's see if they make good on these promises.

> NGINX projects will be born and hosted on GitHub because that’s where the developer and open source communities work.

friendly tip - not everything is on Github, not everyone is on Github, everything can be on Github but that's not the only place everything can be

Practically, almost all open source work is on GitHub. I don't think I ever saw a project or library that I used on Gitlab, I saw something a few years ago on Bitbucket, and except for a couple of legacy libraries on bespoke source control servers I can't think of any other example. N>1000, but of course N<100%.

I've seen a few on GitLab, IIRC KDE is there too.

KDE, GNOME, and freedesktop host their own GitLab instances.

I don't think self-hosting on Gitlab is going to help nginx's objective of being in a shared place where people already are and already have users.

> almost all open source work is on GitHub. I don't think I ever saw

"all open source work that I know of, is on Github"

Where did you look for source code, on Github. Where is the source code you found after looking? Github. Where is "almost all open source work" that I saw? on Github. etc..

> Where did you look for source code, on Github

No, GitHub is where I was linked to from the project's homepage, or the package's page on the package manager, or from a Google search result.

I suspect there are many developments by Chinese hosted on local hosting (Gitee?)

Sure, but the ecosystems are pretty well separated by legal & technical & language barriers. F5 / nginx mainly target the non-Chinese portion of the tech ecosystem.

I’m disappointed at Microsoft and GitHub as the next person but open source happens on GitHub. Period. I have a GitLab account with some code there but unless there’s a huge shift, I’m not gonna be contributing to OSS on GitLab. It’s just a hassle to remember where everything is.

Also, if you need further evidence of this, look at the MARA diagram. It basically spells it out. There's 2 products in that stack that are branded: nginx and Kubernetes, the rest is noise, with nginx positioned as the only component for traffic ingress. Also if that napkin scribbling constitutes an "architecture"...

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