Drama? This feels like your own projection.

Nginx is a stable, and reliable piece of software. It was before this, and will be after this. What happened is that someone who used to work on it now works on a new thing. This happens, people are not slaves to their previous projects. They can and should do new things when they wish to.

In time if the new thing becomes usefull in some way perhaps some people will choose to use it instead of nginx. Perhaps that day will never come. Both of those are fine.

What is certain is that nginx has a critical mass behind it that even if a core developer moves away to do something else it won’t shrivel up and die. If you are an nginx user today in a personal or professional capacity most likely you will be able to use it until the end of your life with no special worries.

I have no problem with you using Apache httpd, and I am happy that you are happy with your choice. On the other hand it does not feel usefull to portray this as some special reason why one should not have choosen nginx.

Is it that much of a drama? Seems more like this is the whole selling point of open source - if you don't like something, you fork it, and people can vote with their installations. This kind of stuff happens all the time in private companies, but we as users have much less influence over the outcome.

I'm having a great time with Caddy. My whole Jupyter stack is reverse proxied to Caddy, and the Caddy config is a single line compared to the 100 line mess that they reccomend people use for Apache or nginx

(yes caddy takes care of upgrading your headers, websockets, certificates, all of it)

I'd rather have gotten 15 years out of a superior solution personally.

A fork is not necessary bad for users. Nginx is already a great product and I believe both Nginx Inc version and freenginx will not become worse over the time. Likely they would gain different features, will have different release schedules e. t. c.

Apache needs slowloris mitigation, and a dozen other tweaks to get it secure (mpm-itk, fail2ban rules, and anti-spammer mods etc.) It can be good, but most people run the vanilla install. Sometimes it is the only solution... ;-)

However, Nginx gets over 20% more concurrent users per host... Hence the main reason people put up with its lack of features and silly HA design.

Forks can be healthy, but it usually quickly degrades into a competition for users.

Hope everyone has fun =)

This is how Apache came into being (without so many hard feelings, maybe), though -- as (what we would now call) a fork, of NCSA httpd.