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It does seem like they're trying to change that, at least somewhat? (See nginx.com/blog/future-of.)

The Future of NGINX: Getting Back to Our Open Source Roots - NGINX

At NGINX Sprint 2022, we're focusing on our open source roots. Find out about the initiatives we're pursuing in the coming year and let us know what you'd like to see.

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I'll believe it when I see it. Their business model is at odds with an open source project accepting contributions, since they get their money from implementing features based on contract work and selling access to features exclusively available in NGINX Plus. Doesn't mix well.

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Do these contract features get implemented for OSS or Nginx Plus, or only as proprietary plugins for the buyer? Curious.

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Probably a mix of both. They probably don't like to maintain a bunch of core features in NGINX Plus. A particularly frustrating thing is that you can see a bunch of stubs for proprietary features in the open source nginx since they do make things convenient for themselves.

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It's one of those projects that theoretically takes contributions but where in reality it's extremely hard to get them to accept any features not directly requested by their customers and they may want to write it themselves to get paid by them anyway. It's fairly frustrating.

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unit.nginx.org has much more open development with commercial support instead of a proprietary variant and maybe they're trying a different business model with it. I don't really think they plan to change things for the traditional nginx web server / reverse proxy.

unit.nginx.org

NGINX Unit: About

A versatile open-source server for a diverse Web.

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My view on what's happening is they see NGINX Unit as eventually replacing nginx so they can treat nginx as a legacy cash cow. This year nginx had no commits from Feb 4th until one on April 29th, then nothing until May 24th. It's back to regular slow entirely internal dev now.

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Oh, wow, interesting -- maybe I should move to Caddy or something...

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That pause might have something to do with Russia's invasion of Ukraine since F5 is American with a bunch of Russians still working for them (nginx originated there). nginx hosts more than half the web but doesn't get the resources you'd expect and barely takes contributions.

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Look at github.com/nginx/nginx/co though. Especially considering that nginx has TCP/UDP proxying, mail proxying and a bunch of other things, not just a caching web proxy / static file server, is that really the pace you'd expect? For comparison: github.com/nginx/unit/com.

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99% of recent stuff on nginx has been batches of bug fixes split into tiny commits including fixing properly enforcing restrictions on requested URIs and properly handling having multiple headers with same key which was supposed to be handled the same as comma separated values.

5:47 AM · Aug 28, 2022Twitter Web App

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Not marked as security fixes, but from my perspective: security fixes. Not really much else happening aside from that. Lots of people who want stuff, even some people who write patches for things, but little of it goes anywhere. Odd situation for software hosting half the web.