"freenginx" open source package and "nginx" from F5 open source, potential conflict?

Good day, debian-legal!

Back on February 14th, an email went to the standard NGINX mailing list that NGINX (F5) open source development changed a lot of policies and interfered with security policy use cases enough to irritate one of the main community developers of NGINX.  At that time, a fork was created of the NGINX project called "freenginx".  The list announcement of this can be seen at [1].

I was approached separately by Maxim as a known package maintainer for NGINX to see if I can help get freenginx into Debian and Ubuntu.  However, as a person in business myself as a consultant, and someone who had to ask Canonical to get involved on an unrelated trademark violation issue, I'm concerned that there may be a trademark violation problem at play.

While theoretically there wouldn't be one and we can simply add Provides: nginx to both freenginx and nginx packaging and conflicts/breaks on freenginx vs. standard nginx because the two won't behave right with each other, the concern I have is that we're introducing a trademark problem into the mix.

So, before I follow through with Debian packaging (which would be synced to Ubuntu downstream), may I get the opinion of debian-legal on whether there's any copyright or trademark violation concerns that exist before I pursue getting this into Debian?


Thomas Ward
Debian Maintainer for multiple packages
Ubuntu Core Developer

[1]: https://mailman.nginx.org/pipermail/nginx/2024-February/GPXQY27UA5SJJZ2Y6JWTRWJB2TKPTJR7.html