Rambler Group will drop NGINX criminal case

Rambler media group said it will stop trying to have a criminal case brought against webserver Nginx.

As we already mentioned before, Russian police raided the NGINX Moscow office last week. Rambler is claiming Sysoev developed the NGINX while he was working for the Rambler as a system administrator, hence they are the rightful owner of the project because they believe Sysoev was working on the project during work hours. On the other hand, Sysoev claims that he worked on the project during his free time and NGINX was never part of his responsibilities as a Rambler employee.

Civil case

Rambler faced a big backlash in Russia after the police raid. Some websites even staged a 30-minute blackout to support the NGINX team. Third-party observers are claiming that legal case’s unusual escalation to a criminal investigation rather than a regular lawsuit makes no sense. Rambler was also accused of it never tried to impose ownership claims over NGINX until it is acquired by F5 Networks for $670 million.

After the backlash, the board of directors unanimously voted to back down from the situation and promised to withdraw the criminal complaint. But Rambler also says that they will continue to look for potential rights violations, but not through a criminal case, through a civil court instead.

Lev Khasis, First Deputy Chairman of the Management Board of Sberbank, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Rambler said:

“In the modern world, situations of disputes over intellectual property rights are ubiquitous, and it is natural for technology companies to defend their rights, but these issues must be resolved in a civil-law plane. We have been in contact with the founders of Ngnix for several days and will try to help resolve this issue. Taking this opportunity, I want to emphasize that Rambler, and Sberbank fully support the unanimous position of the Russian technology community regarding open source solutions.”

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