6 ms·

Nginx, Inc. announces its Series A funding

188 points by tbassetto 15y ago

renownedmedia 15y ago
This is really awesome... I didn't even know they had a real company, I thought it was just another open source entity. Can't wait to see the awesome software they produce! The days of Apache are dwindling!
- philf 15y ago
  I think the company was founded in July. So it's a relatively recent development.
arkitaip 15y ago
Suddenly I'm very glad that there's competition and other open source alternatives on the web server market.
- angelbob 15y ago
  Don't worry. Apache isn't going anywhere any time soon. For that matter, older versions of NginX still work great.
pilif 15y ago
I'm really happy for nginx to get the recognition that it deserves and I'd love nothing more than see the people behind it being able to make a living doing nothing but nginx. 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)
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- For_Iconoclasm 15y ago
  I feel the same way. Nginx has been the little ngin that could, supported by a bunch of talented hackers dedicated to bringing something to the table that the big-time servers, even the open source ones, couldn't. Nginx's history of being the lightweight, faster competitor to Apache (a shining example of success in the open source world) practically defines its identity. 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.
  - pork 15y ago
    Nginx is one of those rare products where I felt no need to upgrade from the now-ancient 0.7.6 version because it just does everything I need well. Truly an amazing little piece of code, on par (in my books) with venerable oldies like qmail.
    - przemoc 15y ago
      I almost agree, i.e. second-level-legacy 0.7.x line is good enough for most of web needs, so indeed there is no really strong urge to upgrade to the current stable, though some nice features came later. What I do not agree is keeping really old 0.7.6 instead of upgrading to safer and more stable 0.7.6y (and if you do, going to the latest 0.7.69 is obviously the best solution).
      - protagonist_h 15y ago
        Upgrading to at least the latest minor version (0.7.6y as you say) may indeed be a good idea since there have been some security vulnerabilities discovered e.g. http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2009-2629 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.
fletcher 15y ago
I don't trust this model, since when building a company that's based on open source software you have just two business models available: 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.
- antirez 15y ago
  Model number 3: 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.
  - Hitchhiker 15y ago
    Amazed to see the author of hping2 here .. ah that was a different era ;-)
    - krookoo 15y ago
      I remmeber him from his tcl days and I love the guy.
      - Hitchhiker 15y ago
        this shows an amazing value system: " But my grandfather and my father always got payed to work, so I trust this model, and I'm not seeking richness "
przemoc 15y ago
So now what? Commercial nginx with WebDAV support for all those serious companies using SVN? It doesn't require as much as $3M, or does it? :)
sixtofour 15y ago
I don't know when nginx.com/net came to be, but it's a much nicer site than nginx.org. Almost corporate looking. Good luck to their team.
lkozma 15y ago
I really love the way these guys go about things: 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.
EvanMiller 15y ago
I think this is great news. I remember the excitement of first discovering Nginx back in 2006 and realizing that the world's most popular web server (Apache) was based on inferior technology. Here was this unknown proxy server written by one guy in Russia, but inside the well-structured, completely undocumented code base was the power to serve almost all the world's web traffic. And he was always more than happy to respond to dumb questions on the mailing list and incorrect patches to his personal account. "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.
garazy 15y ago
"Today NGINX powers over 40,000,000 domains on the Internet" 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.
- protagonist_h 15y ago
  This number probably comes from NetCraft Web Server Survey: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2011/10/06/october-2011-web-server-survey.html http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2011/10/06/october-2011-we... It indeed shows 43M "hostnames" as of Oct 2011.

188 points by tbassetto 15y ago

This is really awesome... I didn't even know they had a real company, I thought it was just another open source entity. Can't wait to see the awesome software they produce! The days of Apache are dwindling!

philf 15y ago
I think the company was founded in July. So it's a relatively recent development.

arkitaip 15y ago

Suddenly I'm very glad that there's competition and other open source alternatives on the web server market.

angelbob 15y ago
Don't worry. Apache isn't going anywhere any time soon. For that matter, older versions of NginX still work great.

pilif 15y ago

I'm really happy for nginx to get the recognition that it deserves and I'd love nothing more than see the people behind it being able to make a living doing nothing but nginx. 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)

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
For_Iconoclasm 15y ago
I feel the same way. Nginx has been the little ngin that could, supported by a bunch of talented hackers dedicated to bringing something to the table that the big-time servers, even the open source ones, couldn't. Nginx's history of being the lightweight, faster competitor to Apache (a shining example of success in the open source world) practically defines its identity. 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.
- pork 15y ago
  Nginx is one of those rare products where I felt no need to upgrade from the now-ancient 0.7.6 version because it just does everything I need well. Truly an amazing little piece of code, on par (in my books) with venerable oldies like qmail.
  - przemoc 15y ago
    I almost agree, i.e. second-level-legacy 0.7.x line is good enough for most of web needs, so indeed there is no really strong urge to upgrade to the current stable, though some nice features came later. What I do not agree is keeping really old 0.7.6 instead of upgrading to safer and more stable 0.7.6y (and if you do, going to the latest 0.7.69 is obviously the best solution).
    - protagonist_h 15y ago
      Upgrading to at least the latest minor version (0.7.6y as you say) may indeed be a good idea since there have been some security vulnerabilities discovered e.g. http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2009-2629 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.

fletcher 15y ago

I don't trust this model, since when building a company that's based on open source software you have just two business models available: 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.

antirez 15y ago
Model number 3: 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.
- Hitchhiker 15y ago
  Amazed to see the author of hping2 here .. ah that was a different era ;-)
  - krookoo 15y ago
    I remmeber him from his tcl days and I love the guy.
    - Hitchhiker 15y ago
      this shows an amazing value system: " But my grandfather and my father always got payed to work, so I trust this model, and I'm not seeking richness "

przemoc 15y ago

So now what? Commercial nginx with WebDAV support for all those serious companies using SVN? It doesn't require as much as $3M, or does it? :)

sixtofour 15y ago

I don't know when nginx.com/net came to be, but it's a much nicer site than nginx.org. Almost corporate looking. Good luck to their team.

lkozma 15y ago

I really love the way these guys go about things: 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.

EvanMiller 15y ago

I think this is great news. I remember the excitement of first discovering Nginx back in 2006 and realizing that the world's most popular web server (Apache) was based on inferior technology. Here was this unknown proxy server written by one guy in Russia, but inside the well-structured, completely undocumented code base was the power to serve almost all the world's web traffic. And he was always more than happy to respond to dumb questions on the mailing list and incorrect patches to his personal account. "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.

garazy 15y ago

"Today NGINX powers over 40,000,000 domains on the Internet" 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.

protagonist_h 15y ago
This number probably comes from NetCraft Web Server Survey: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2011/10/06/october-2011-web-server-survey.html http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2011/10/06/october-2011-we... It indeed shows 43M "hostnames" as of Oct 2011.