> They took open source code made better by tons of volunteers
Had all the volunteers' impact being so big? Nginx was created by single developer who is NGINX, Inc CTO now, and then developed pretty much by Nginx employees only.
Very big yes! No doubt Igor deserves the majority of the honour for Nginx, but volunteer contributors were a big part earlier on, both in patches, investigations and community support.
Search through the change log for "thanks to" http://nginx.org/en/CHANGES and you'll see a lot of contributions. Two people who stand out as frequent contributors are Piotr Sikora and Maxim Dounin (who went on to actually work at Nginx!).
And this does not show the mailing list discussions and bug investigations or the documentation maintained by the community in the early days.
[This post is not intended to mean this sale is bad, just to highlight some of the awesome community contributors]
Had all the volunteers' impact being so big? Nginx was created by single developer who is NGINX, Inc CTO now, and then developed pretty much by Nginx employees only.