Nginx creator Igor Sysoev is planning a company based around the wildly popular open-source web server.
Sysoev announced the decision on the Ngnix blog Monday morning, writing that the commercial entity’s “primary goals are improving support and communication for our users, streamlining the development process, revamping the documentation, integrating and speeding up pending bugfixes and patches, introducing long-requested functionality and more.” Sysoev had been handling much of the development and support for Nginx as a side project since he created the project in 2002, but now will commit to the project full-time.
As of May, Nginx had 7.35 percent of the global web server market — or 23,463,669 hostnames — according to research from Netcraft, so there’s likely plenty of appetite for more consistent support and releases. It also claimed 6.79 percent of the top million web sites as users. Apache is still the dominant web server worldwide, with Microsoft IIS and Google Web Server (thanks primarily to Blogger sites) also maintaining large market shares.
Andrey Alexeev, part of the initial management team for the new company, told me via e-mail that the company is still in its very-early stages and has not officially launched. He also noted the company is entirely self-funded at this point.
We see this type of move fairly often, where the creator of an open-source project either launches a company based upon it or joins a company that has invested heavily in it. Recent examples would be Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto joining Heroku, Piston Cloud Computing launching an OpenStack-based company and Damien Katz forming CouchOne (now part of Couchbase).
Image courtesy of Flickr user whalesalad.
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