Jul 19, 2011 11:21 GMT  ·  By

Nginx, the fairly popular web server, has been operating mostly under the radar for almost a decade now. Nginx's creator, Igor Sysoev, though believes it is time to take it to the next level and is launching a company around the project which will offer services related to the web server and hopefully spur development as well.

"Recently it became very clear for me that because of increasing popularity of nginx and the volume of work required to develop the code and doing support, I really need to put it at another level," Sysoev wrote on the project's site.

"So, I have decided to focus even more on nginx and established nginx as a company to fully dedicate myself to the project," he announced.

"I am not alone, there are a few nice people working for me on this. I am focusing on the development part, and to some extent on the company operations as well," he explained.

The company hasn't been launched yet and is still in the early stages. The idea is to start making some money from the project in order to make it easier to support users, create better documentation - for an environment suited more for enterprises - all the while making it possible to concentrate on the project full time to add new features and fix bugs.

Sysoev makes it clear that nginx will continue to be a fully open source project and will be offered via the same BSD-style license. He also ensures users that development will continue as before and that the focus will not sway towards the commercial applications.

Nginx is one of the most popular web servers out there, not that there are that many of them, behind Apache, Microsoft IIS and the Google web server, with about 9 percent of the active servers using it.