The Board of Directors of Rambler demanded to stop the criminal prosecution of Nginx

The Board of Directors of Rambler, convened on Monday December 16 at the initiative of Sberbank (he has 46.5% Rambler Group), decided to stop the criminal prosecution of Nginx, the company said.

What's happened

The Board of Directors instructed Rambler to terminate the contract with Lynwood, which turned to the police and invite her to withdraw the statement: all disputes should go further in the civil law field. Lynwood is associated with the shareholder of Rambler Alexander Mamut.

The RAMBler management has been instructed to familiarize the founders of NGINX and representatives of the American F5 with “some materials” who bought it for $ 670 million, which indicate possible violations of Rambler's rights, and “conduct consultations with them to resolve the current situation,” the company said.

The personnel committee under the Council of Directors will take up the analysis of the actions of the “officials” of Rambler in terms of interaction with the board of directors on the situation with Nginx.

What is important to know

Sberbank, which became the shareholder of Rambler in August 2019, was not notified of the situation with Nginx, is directly approved in the message. In the Agreement on the transaction, there were only standard guarantees for the absence of unsolved violations of intellectual property rights by third parties and grounds for trials. “In terms of the situation with Nginx, these guarantees were violated,” the board of directors stated.

The company saw the violation of Rambler's rights to NGINX back in 2015, but the possible violation dates back to 2011, it follows from the message. The Lynwood agreement that it will represent the interests of Rambler in this dispute was also concluded in 2015.
Over the past years, Lynwood, along with an unnamed information security company, has collected “about a thousand pages of documents, files and official correspondence related to the participation of“ Rambler ”in the development of the Nginx software product.”
Sberbank does not exclude that legal grounds for the conclusion about violation of the rights of Rambler exist, but insists that the issue should be resolved only within the framework of civil law relations.
The statement has a separate clause that the leadership of Sberbank “publicly spoke out sharply” regarding the initiation of a criminal case, “contacted the founders of Nginx and assured them that Sberbank would make all possible efforts to resolve the controversial situation”.
Alexander Mamut participated in the Council of Directors and agreed with his decisions. “Mamut on Monday participated in the board and supported all the decisions we proposed,” the statement quoted for Forbes as saying the first deputy chairman of the board of Sberbank Leo Hasis.

UPD. Rambler Group CEO Rafael Abramyan told Kommersant that the company was not in the know regarding Lynwood plans and found out about the lawsuit on December 4 from the notification of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Lynwood had all the rights to file a lawsuit, he noted, and Rambler's position on intellectual rights was formed only on the Council of Directors.

The history of the conflict

Last week, in the Russian office of Nginx and in the houses, its founders Igor Sysoev and Maxim Konovalov were searches. Then it became known about the criminal case against the founders of the company, which was instituted on the statement of Lynwood.

“Rambler” after the news about the searches announced that he considers Nginx a “official work”, and the rights to claims and claims transferred Lynwood Investments Cy Ltd. She said that she would achieve the restoration of justice in all available ways in the framework of the legislation in any jurisdiction.

Igor Sysosev did not deny that he created Nginx, working in Rambler, but said that this issue was “thoroughly worked out”: “In Rambler, I worked as a system administrator, and was developing in my free time, the product was produced under the BSD license from the very beginning as open software.”

Colleagues and former Sysoev’s authorities confirmed The Bell that he was engaged in NGINX at his request and could not receive any technical assignment for this - in those years Sysoev worked as a system administrator, and his tasks could not include developing software.

History provoked an international scandal (Nginx is the most popular web server in the world, which occupies about 38% of the market), and a criminal approach to part-time when working on opening projects frightened the developers of similar projects. Sberbank hastened to distance himself from the case, German Gref immediately stated that such disputes should be considered in arbitration.

What's next

The recommendation of the Board of Directors on the termination of the Nginx criminal case is certainly positive news and a big plus to the reputation of Sberbank as a progressive company. The question is how exactly the criminal case will be transferred to a civil law plane.