Maxim Duninone of the key developers of Nginx, announced about creating a new fork – FreeNginx. Unlike the Angie project, which also forked Nginx, the new fork will be developed solely as a non-profit community project. FreeNginx positioned as the main descendant of Nginx – “taking into account the details – rather, the fork remained with F5.” FreeNginx's stated goal is to ensure Nginx development is free from arbitrary corporate interference.
The reason for the creation of the new project was disagreement with the policy of the management of the F5 company, which owns the Nginx project. F5 company changed its security policy without the consent of the developer community and moved on to the practice of assigning CVE identifiers to mark issues that potentially pose a threat to user security as vulnerabilities.
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After the Moscow office was closed in 2022, Maxim retired from F5, but under a separate agreement retained his role in development and continued to develop and oversee the Nginx project as a volunteer. According to Maxim, changing the security policy is contrary to the agreement and no longer allows for control over the changes that developers from the F5 company make to Nginx, therefore, he can no longer consider Nginx as an open and free project developed for the common good.
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