4 ms·

I'm mildly blown away to read, 'And the NGINX community is not very active, and development tends to be “behind closed doors”.' Is this a reflection of the comp

I'm mildly blown away to read, 'And the NGINX community is not very active, and development tends to be “behind closed doors”.' Is this a reflection of the company, nginx (now owned by F5) going the way of an Oracle-style takeover of WebLogic from another era?

moderation 4y ago
Dropbox wrote about their migration from NGINX to Envoy in July 2020 and highlighted a lot of the same concerns [0]. As per this thread [1], NGINX have posted very similar blog posts for the last two years saying they are 'returning to our open source roots', but without much tangible change. And the Cloudflare CEO forecasted this move away from NGINX back in 2018 [2] 0. https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/how-we-migrated-dropbox-from-nginx-to-envoy https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/how-we-migrated-dropbox-... 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32572153 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32572153 2. https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1024515150546493440 https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1024515150546493440
schmichael 4y ago
IMHO nginx has never been a particularly "open" or friendly open source project. I don't mean to sound rude. I don't think open source contributors "owe" anyone anything in this regard. If you want to throw code over a wall and run away, that's your prerogative. However I do think Cloudflare's assessment is accurate and a real liability for them. Some of the OSS papercuts with nginx: - nginx has always used a "submit a patch to a mailing list" style of contributions. Many contributions, my own attempt a decade ago, just get ghosted: https://mailman.nginx.org/pipermail/nginx-devel/2010-December/000605.html https://mailman.nginx.org/pipermail/nginx-devel/2010-Decembe... - Neither the contributing page (http://nginx.org/en/docs/contributing_changes.html http://nginx.org/en/docs/contributing_changes.html) nor the Mercurial repo (http://hg.nginx.org/ http://hg.nginx.org/) redirect to HTTPS! - Tests were a later addition and in a distinct repo with a bespoke harness. I'm sure it has advantages, but it also takes extra work for contributors to figure out. - They use Trac?! I loved Trac circa 2008 but had no idea it was still a thing. I can't even login to it without it timing out. I don't want to nitpick an excellent project like nginx, but I think it's clear that easing third party contributions has never been a high priority.
- mijoharas 4y ago
  > - They use Trac?! I loved Trac circa 2008 but had no idea it was still a thing. I can't even login to it without it timing out. Oh wow! I totally forgot about Trac. That was the first ticket management software I used and I completely forgot about it's existence. Thanks for the impromptu trip down memory lane.

moderation 4y ago

Dropbox wrote about their migration from NGINX to Envoy in July 2020 and highlighted a lot of the same concerns [0]. As per this thread [1], NGINX have posted very similar blog posts for the last two years saying they are 'returning to our open source roots', but without much tangible change. And the Cloudflare CEO forecasted this move away from NGINX back in 2018 [2] 0. https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/how-we-migrated-dropbox-from-nginx-to-envoy https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/how-we-migrated-dropbox-... 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32572153 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32572153 2. https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1024515150546493440 https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1024515150546493440

schmichael 4y ago

IMHO nginx has never been a particularly "open" or friendly open source project. I don't mean to sound rude. I don't think open source contributors "owe" anyone anything in this regard. If you want to throw code over a wall and run away, that's your prerogative. However I do think Cloudflare's assessment is accurate and a real liability for them. Some of the OSS papercuts with nginx: - nginx has always used a "submit a patch to a mailing list" style of contributions. Many contributions, my own attempt a decade ago, just get ghosted: https://mailman.nginx.org/pipermail/nginx-devel/2010-December/000605.html https://mailman.nginx.org/pipermail/nginx-devel/2010-Decembe... - Neither the contributing page (http://nginx.org/en/docs/contributing_changes.html http://nginx.org/en/docs/contributing_changes.html) nor the Mercurial repo (http://hg.nginx.org/ http://hg.nginx.org/) redirect to HTTPS! - Tests were a later addition and in a distinct repo with a bespoke harness. I'm sure it has advantages, but it also takes extra work for contributors to figure out. - They use Trac?! I loved Trac circa 2008 but had no idea it was still a thing. I can't even login to it without it timing out. I don't want to nitpick an excellent project like nginx, but I think it's clear that easing third party contributions has never been a high priority.

mijoharas 4y ago
> - They use Trac?! I loved Trac circa 2008 but had no idea it was still a thing. I can't even login to it without it timing out. Oh wow! I totally forgot about Trac. That was the first ticket management software I used and I completely forgot about it's existence. Thanks for the impromptu trip down memory lane.