While Apache still maintains a whopping 70% of the global web serving total, a young contender is on the rise, and has just taken its first steps into forming a business from its increasing popularity.
The founders of the nginx (pronounced “engine x”) project, an open-source, event-driven, efficient web server, have announced that they are to start a company to handle the development effort on the project.
When Igor Sysoev - a 30-something Kazakh developer based in Moscow with a degree from the city's Bauman State Technical University - started the nginx project in 2002, it would have been difficult to tell exactly where the project would have ended up. Apache's dominance of the market has continued to this day, but nginx's combination of a light footprint and extremely high efficiency have made it the server of choice for high-performance websites looking to squeeze every last ounce from their servers. Nowadays it can claim nearly 5% of the global service for the busiest websites, including for example wordpress.com.
Until now, Sysoev has been developing nginx with the community as a side project, but he has now formed a company with co-founder Andrey Alexeev and one other member to work on nginx full time.
“I have decided to focus even more on nginx and established nginx as a company to fully dedicate myself to the project” writes Sysoev. “Our 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.”
“There will be no shortage of new and long-awaited features too.”
Sysoev has also reassured the community that nginx will continue to be completely free and open source.
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