you're both being downvoted because you're both completely wrong. it turns out permissively licensed, security-focused, and easy to maintain code bases aren't easy to find outside of OpenBSD. so sometimes they have to write their own.

say, a packet filter, for example...

did you even RTFA? They wanted to continue using nginx.

Exactly, they want to appropriate it and improve it in line with their philospohy. That isn't incompatible with my comment.

That would be forking, no?

They're not appropriating it. They're just creating another reverse proxy.