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Our Blogs Open Sauce Life in the trenches: an OpenSSH developer speaks
Our Blogs Open Sauce Life in the trenches: an OpenSSH developer speaks | Life in the trenches: an OpenSSH developer speaks |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Friday, 24 October 2008 | |
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Page 3 of 6 Miller then realised that re-inventing the wheel was a waste of time. "So I just copied what the OpenBSD people had done. And that was the approach adopted whenever OpenSSH was being adapted to other operating systems." Featured Whitepaper
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Once he had released a version for Linux and posted a message about it to the BugTRAQ security mailing list, Miller started to get feedback. A lot of it was patches that people had devised to make OpenSSH run on their own operating systems. Pretty soon, he says, that one email resulted in something akin to a project. "That's basically how the portable OpenSSH project started. Since then I've basically tracked the OpenBSD releases, and made corresponding changes so that OpenSSH would work on other platforms. Initially, it was just Linux and Solaris but other platforms were added very quickly - AIX, HP-UX, SGI, the other BSDs, and some operating systems which I'd never heard of before. And these were all contributed by other people." The response did not surprise Miller. "People had kind of gotten hooked on SSH when it was free and were kind of miffed when it was taken away from them. And you know once you have been given something free and then had it taken from you, that's kind of the heroin dealer's model of getting clients. It might work in some cases, but it doesn't work for everyone. So there was a bit of pent-up demand. My experience was mostly with people who used Linux but it was part of a wider culture, all free operating systems. People had gotten used to having high-quality software being available free. And SSH was a piece of software which was first free and then wasn't so it went against expectations." Not long after, the project got its first legal threat. "I think it was in 2000 when we got our first legal threat from ssh.com, which was the commercialisation of the original version. They basically threatened us with trademark infringements, saying you can't call your software SSH because SSH is a trademark. It was a bogus claim for a number of reasons: SSH is a contraction of secure shell and the legal advice we had was that one could not trademark an acronym. And then ssh.com had a history of encouraging people to call compatible products ssh; there was an ssh implementation for the Palm Pilot and the author of that had correspondence with one of the principals behind ssh.com encouraging its use. Our legal advice also said that if one did not take steps to defend one's trademark, one was basically abandoning it. "Thirdly, most amusingly for me, they had botched the registration of their trademark. They had trademarked it as a logo rather than as a word or a term. So unless we were using the word SSH on a purple blob or whatever it was, we were on pretty safe ground. Once this was pointed out to them, they backed off." He says de Raadt received most of the legal threats. "And, of course, he didn't back down. It was good because you hear of a lot of free software projects which stop what they are doing because of some legal threat or another when basically, they have a perfect right to go on doing what they are doing. So it's good that Theo fought the good fight on that one." |
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