DEV Community

Discussion on: MS IIS or F5 NGINX ?

Collapse
 
ferricoxide profile image
Thomas H Jones II

Makes me throw up in my mouth, a little, seeing someone refer to NGINX as "F5". =)

Collapse
 
osde8info profile image
Clive Da

why ? F5 own NGINX !

Collapse
 
ferricoxide profile image
Thomas H Jones II

It's kinda like saying "Oracle MySQL": yeah, some corporation came in and bought an established, popular OSS project, but it's not like the current ownership was significantly part of establishing that project. Similarly, it's not yet clear whether the current ownership is going to be a good custodian of the project, or whether people are going to be caused to either fork or wholy abandon the project when the new ownership changes licensing terms.

IIS at least was wholly originated by Microsoft.

Microsoft now owns GitHub: do you say "Microsoft GitHub" ...or do you just say "GitHub"?

Thread Thread
 
osde8info profile image
Clive Da

good point i'd never say oracle mysql that grates but i do say ibm openshift

Thread Thread
 
ferricoxide profile image
Thomas H Jones II

I'd tend to disagree with calling it "IBM OpenSHift": while I realize IBM bought Red Hat, the purchaseable product is still Red Hat branded. Given that IBM supposedly doesn't want to antagonize either the Red Hat employee-base or, more importantly, the subsidiary's buying-community, they're supposedly not planning to do any re-branding.

That said, OpenShift is still heavily opensource. So, if I were talking about the purchaseable version, then I'd probably say "Red Hat OpenShift" (vice just "OpenShift" when referring to the free product).

Thread Thread
 
ferricoxide profile image
Thomas H Jones II

Where I'd probably invoke vendor names in the context of (semi-) open solution is when more than one vendor has an offering based on that solution. For example, Java:

  • Oracle Java (or, really, just "Java") refers to the reference, and now wholly commercial, Java implementation
  • IBM Java is/was a Java implementation specific to IBM and its products (e.g., WebSphere generally worked best with IBM's Java
  • Microsoft Java Edition was the implementation that Micosoft maintained back in the early 2000s. It had its adherents because, in some cases, it was a better implementation than the one Sun maintained (performed on MS OSes much better than Sun's reference implementation did). Last I'd heard, they moved their efforts under the OpenJava project, though.
  • OpenJava/OpenJDK seems to be what many Linux distributions are making available in their default software repositories (at least, the ones that are concerned about tainting)
Collapse
 
victorioberra profile image
Victorio Berra

Because Nginx was written by one dude names Igor Sysoev and first publicly released in 2004. It wasn't bought by F5 until very recently (March 2019) for $670 million. So many of us, especially those that are older, remember the days when it was free and open-source software. Which technically it still is, but now instead of Nginx owning Nginx, its owned by a huge publicly traded company. For a lot of us, Nginx was our FIRST experience with a real web server. :P

Thread Thread
 
osde8info profile image
Clive Da

i probably feel the same way about oracle java and oracle virtualbox

Thread Thread
 
ferricoxide profile image
Thomas H Jones II

Java and VirtualBox with both also previously Sun properties. That they're now "Oracle Java" or "Oracle Virtualbox", rather than simply "Java" or "Virtualbox" is a side-effect of Oracle having bought Sun.

Even as a technically corporate entity, Sun was typically a good contributor to the open community and usually a not awful steward of acquired opensource projects. Oracle bought Sun, in part, to exert ownership over and attempt to more-heavily monetize the many, established products Sun stewarded for the open community.

When you say "F5 NGINX" it evokes horrible memories of what companies like Oracle have done to popular projects.