The Grumpy Editor's guide to SSH servers [LWN.net]

The Grumpy Editor's guide to SSH servers

Posted Jun 22, 2006 7:58 UTC (Thu) by dd9jn (subscriber, #4459)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's guide to SSH servers by kirkengaard
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to SSH servers

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.

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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,
Wol