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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 5 of 6 Miller says that part of the reasoning behind this release was the fact that OpenSSH, even at this stage, 2003, was used widely. "Theo heard from someone who was responsible for maintaining the university network in Japan that over 2001 and 2002, we'd basically killed telnet and rsh on their network. The use of these old unencrypted login protocols had diminished in direct proportion to the use of SSH which was driven by OpenSSH." Featured Whitepaper
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"That brings us up to the present day more or less where OpenSSH is mostly done and we think very hard when we're implementing a new feature, whether it's worth it in terms of stability and maintainability. The curse of having a mature bit of software like OpenSSH is that unless you are scrambling to include features not many people are willing to work on maintenance. We get bug-fixes from various places - some of the people who bundle up OpenSSH with their operating systems send us fixes." For the last two years, Miller has been working as a software engineer with Google. "I don't have a formal degree as an engineer. The downside of that is that I've had to go back and learn a lot of the boring but important fundamentals that you get by doing a computer science degree. I probably would have been a lot more productive ten years back had I done that. But you can fix these things up in retrospect. I probably could have been a more effective developer earlier had I done a degree. but teaching myself things has given me a perspective which has its own value." He doesn't find this lack of a formal degree a disadvantage when attending a job interview. "Maybe (it was a disadvantage) 10 to 12 years ago. But these days, I think people look at results and being involved with OpenSSH and a few other free software projects is a tangible thing that I can point to. I think anyone who has any significant involvement in developing free software is instantly employable. If nothing else, it's a sign of real interest and eagerness and it demonstrates something that a degree cannot." Though Miller is now an OpenBSD developer, he still keeps Linux around. "I use it for work and on my wife's laptop. I really came to like OpenBSD shortly after I started working on OpenSSH. It's a very developer-friendly project. The whole operating system is engineered as a cohesive whole. It's very easy to polish any bit that annoys you in any way and very easy to get changes submitted. Working on Linux and submitting changes back I've found to be a lot more difficult - you're dealing with half a dozen different projects if you're making a change to anything." He says Linux gets all the buzz because of the huge headstart the project had. "I think Linux got a huge headstart because of all the legal problems in the original BSD project. When Linux was kind of a toy operating system - and I don't mean that in a pejorative sense - and it didn't really do much, BSD was a more or less complete system. Had it not been for the lawsuits, we'd probably all be using BSD instead of Linux today." |
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