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