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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 6 of 6 Miller has no problems with the BSD licence which allows people to take a snippet of code, use it in proprietary software and lock it away. "I don't see locking away code as necessarily a bad thing. If they are using our code, then they are not going to make the same mistakes that we made initially, so especially with security software, that's a good thing. If people take what we've made and make a better product, that's fine. They haven't taken anything away from us. Featured Whitepaper
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"For example, the version of SSH in the iPhone is our code which has been turned into a commercial product. But it doesn't take anything away from us. We do it because we enjoy it and because it makes our lives and other people's lives better." He doesn't feel that if someone is benefitting from his work, then others should benefit from that person's work. "There's an ethical imperative that they do that. I don't think that it should be in the form of a legal requirement." These days, Miller is kept busy by his two-year-old son, Hugo. His wife, Simone, is not a technical person. "I met her through friends. I have a lot of friends, most of them have nothing to do with IT. "Nowadays my interests are pretty much limited to being a dad. I used to like going running and watching movies, reading, and travelling. That's a bit limited but it's slowly becoming more possible as our son's becoming a lot more self-sufficient." Simone, he says, has been incredibly tolerant. "She's put up with noisy computers under desks and me getting up at odd hours to deal with people in different timezones. Her tolerance has certainly made it possible for me to do a lot of what I've done." Right now, work with OpenSSH is pretty much only maintenance. "We had a pretty large release a few months ago because we had two hackathons, one in Japan and the other in Canada, where we got quite a bit of OpenSSH work done. Quite a bit of that was bug-fixing; we made a real effort to bash away at the bug list. Some of these bugs dated back as much as seven years and they were real recalcitrant ones which we had to bash our heads together to fix. We added some new features as well, things which people had asked for for some years and which we finally got around to adding. That was our biggest release in years, we probably won't do another one like that for a while." |
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