Former executive director of Rambler Igor Ashmanov offered help in resolving the conflict betweenRambler Group Internet holding and nginx IT company.
On December 12, searches were held at the nginx Moscow office. According to Rambler, the founder of nginx Igor Sysoev, who worked for them in the 2000s, created his own project during office hours and should return the rights to it.
According to the criminal case of December 4, 2019in part 3 of Article 146 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (violation of copyright and related rights by a group of persons by prior conspiracy on an especially large scale), the damage caused to Rambler was estimated at 51.4 million rubles.
"NGINX is a utility product,which has been developed since the early 2000s within the framework of labor relations with «Rambler» was carried out by Igor Sysoev, therefore any use of this program without the consent of Rambler Group is a violation of the exclusive right,”- said a Rambler representative in a comment to The Bell.
Sysoev and co-founder of nginx Maxim Konovalov were detained by the Moscow Main Directorate of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but later released home.
The Rambler transferred the right to resolve the dispute to the company of its co-owner Alexander Mamut Lynwood Investments CY Ltd.
Igor Ashmanov, who hired Igor in 2000Sysoev for the position of system administrator at Rambler, stated that at the time of the conclusion of the contract with him, the nginx prototype already existed, and Sysoev continued to work on it in his free time - this was not related to his work responsibilities.
«When hiring Sysoev, it was specificallyit is agreed that he has his own project, and he has the right to deal with it. It was then called something like mod_accel; he gave it the name nginx somewhere in 2001-2002. I can testify about this in court»,— said the businessman.
Accusations «Rambler» Ashmanov named«nonsense» and stated that the holding would have to prove that Sysoev received an official assignment from them to develop nginx. However, he expressed doubts that such papers ever existed. Until this moment, the intellectual property belongs to Sysoev.
«For now, I asked our lawyer Timofey Musatov, who is dealing with Vinnik in Greece, to see what is happening there. <…> I think the bastards will break off»,— wrote Ashmanov.
nginx is one of the most famous IT companies,created by Russian programmers. In 2002, the former system administrator “Rambler” Igor Sysoev created an open-source web server, and in 2011 founded the company nginx. More than 30% of Runet websites, including ForkLog, operate on the basis of nginx. This year, the American F5 Networks bought nginx for $ 670 million.