police
Context for followers who are not computer people: Nginx is open source software that is used on probably billions of web servers.
The author of the software is being sued by a former employer, arguing that they own the copyright on the software.
If this is the case, every user of nginx in the world (myself, and probably whatever site you’re reading this on) is infringing on their copyright. And presumably therefore potentially liable for damages.
I have read a claim that under Russian law, employers do not automatically hold copyright over software created by their employees outside of the course of their employment, but I don’t know if that’s true or not.
It may also depend what was in the author’s employment contract, whether he used computers owned by the company to create it, etc.
@qyliss there's been some discussion about this on the fosstodon.org local timeline.
Treat this as rumors, I don't have sources available:
The company claiming it's there's has been acquired shortly before this by another company that's very close to the russian government. So maybe it's also about large scale political issues. If they get precedence decisions backing their claims, they have quite big leverage against users of the software all over the world.