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The Grumpy Editor's guide to SSH serversThe Grumpy Editor's guide to SSH serversPosted Jun 21, 2006 20:26 UTC (Wed) by kirkengaard (subscriber, #15022)Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to SSH servers
This seems to be the case with many de facto standard codebases. Like monolithic shade trees, it is hard for anything to grow in their shadow; most things that try to fill the same niche wind up compared to the 'big tree', just as dropbear and lsh do here. This is, to some extent, a self-reinforcing issue, and it can have good results, as you pointed out. A monoculture built around fanatic security-consciousness is perhaps more stable than some others. Big trees of this sort eat up a large share of their noosphere 'ground', and take up a very large share of the developer attention 'light'. Consider that dropbear lives by filling an available niche in the SSH market. There is ground and light for their particular choices. Lsh seems to be suffering the "Me, too!" that the GNU reimplementation tendencies can drive people to. The developer's itch is not common enough; OpenSSH is not enough of a pain to drive quality and masses to a GNU reimplementation.
I don't mean to sound like I'm complaining about the quality of the competition like it's OpenSSH's fault. This is a group choice in large part. It could be worse; at least this dominant player is nominally on the Open side of the fence, even if prickly at times. I've always thought of the logo as a caveat. ;)
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The Grumpy Editor's guide to SSH servers Posted Jun 21, 2006 20:38 UTC (Wed) by kirkengaard (subscriber, #15022) [Link] (Wow, I need to be consistent with analogies, or leave them alone. Sorry!)
acacia nilotica Posted Jun 22, 2006 4:19 UTC (Thu) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link] Hmmm, a prickly kind of large shade tree. Try Acacia Nilotica.http://eriss.erin.gov.au/biodiversity/invasive/publicatio... It's an African species, but in Australia it's a 'weed of national significance'.
The Grumpy Editor's guide to SSH servers Posted Jun 22, 2006 7:58 UTC (Thu) by dd9jn (subscriber, #4459) [Link] To be fair the lsh developers: The lsh project came to life at a time when there was no free SSH implementation available and the GNU task list had a free ssh protocol implementation as an item. Then OpenSSH appeared out of the nowhere. Thus speaking of a GNU re-implementation is in this case not correct. Actually the OpenSSH development was the other way around: They took the last GPL implementation of ssh.com and replaced all GPL code by new code under the BSD license.
IIRC, the reason for the unusual architecture of lsh (i.e. very lispy) is due to several rewrites and that Nisse started reading the Wizard book while working on lsh.
The Grumpy Editor's guide to SSH servers Posted Jun 22, 2006 8:44 UTC (Thu) by kirkengaard (subscriber, #15022) [Link] Thanks; I wasn't aware of that. So it was a common itch, and poof! OpenSSH came along. That makes way more sense. Sorry for any false implications or statements on my part!
The Grumpy Editor's guide to SSH servers Posted Jun 22, 2006 23:22 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] Uhm.. actually I dont think ssh.com was ever GPL'd. They took the last version that had a BSD like licesne and worked from there.
The Grumpy Editor's guide to SSH servers Posted Jun 23, 2006 7:15 UTC (Fri) by dd9jn (subscriber, #4459) [Link] ssh 1.2.12 is the version OpenSSH was based on. It included for big integer arithmetics a copy of the GMP 1.3.2 - that version of the GMP (from 1993) is under the GPL. The FSF later relicensed the GMP under the LGPL but this is not the version included and used by that and all earlier ssh versions. Thus the rules of the GPL apply to these versions of ssh.
The Grumpy Editor's guide to SSH servers Posted Jun 29, 2006 7:48 UTC (Thu) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link] Just because a GPL library was included doesn't make SSH GPL too ... it just means the SSH licence must be GPL-compatible (which is true of BSD).
So It's quite likely the SSH code was BSD, the library was GPL, and hence the combination was GPL.
In which case, there was no need to "rewrite all the GPL'd SSH code" because there wasn't any GPL'd SSH code to rewrite! :-)
Cheers,
The Grumpy Editor's guide to SSH servers Posted Jun 29, 2006 5:40 UTC (Thu) by djm (subscriber, #11651) [Link] To be fair to Niels Moller (the lsh developer), he actually started working on lsh before we started on OpenSSH, so it isn't a "me too" product.
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