As explained in the FAQ (which is in Chinese I'll give you that) they created the fork for a few reasons: - Patch have been historically slow to be accepted in

As explained in the FAQ (which is in Chinese I'll give you that) they created the fork for a few reasons: - Patch have been historically slow to be accepted in NGINX, - Some of their patches have been specifically rejected, including the syslog/pipe one (and it's probably a crucial feature for them), - They needed a place to share their pool of patches and enhancements, Overall, I don't see anything wrong with that; isn't the hacker culture nowadays prone to forking (Github anyone?). We are here in front of a big player of the Chinese Web space (Taobao is massive in China, we use it on a daily basis at the office as do hundreds of millions of other users) committing resources to release and maintain code in the pure spirit of OSS, in a country where that very specific behavior (sharing and openness) is still in it's infancy. I applaud the guys at Taobao and hope this will help foster the OSS movement in China.