Life in the Trenches: an OpenSSH Developer Speaks

[ Thanks to Sam Varghese for this link. ]

"There was a version of SSH available at the time, put out by a Finnish developer named Tatu Ylonen, but the licensing terms were rather restrictive. "It was initially a kind of permissive licence which said that you could do what you liked with it but if you changed the protocol you were not allowed to call it SSH anymore," Miller says.

""Then slowly others (restrictions) were added, like you can't sell it, you can't use it for any commercial use, you can only use it for academic or personal use. We were a small company and we couldn't afford a couple of hundred bucks worth of software to plonk on each of these machines. So I wrote a fairly horrible equivalent using the SSL protocol which kept us going until I heard of the OpenBSD project's work on creating OpenSSH. I had used OpenBSD once or twice back then; it didn't fulfill the need I had so I kept using Linux. But I took a bit more notice of OpenBSD once I heard of OpenSSH because this was something which useful to our company.""

Complete Story

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