RedHat forks OpenSSH?

[Douglas E. Engert]

Theo de Raadt wrote:

>>>Now some users are saying to the OpenSSH developers that maybe they
>>>should reconsider.  Will you not at least listen, as you ask Red Hat to
>>>do?
>>
>>Who said we haven't listened? I just haven't heard any convincing
>>arguments why we should spend extra time supporting a vendor who
>>makes our jobs harder and won't even do us the courtesy of responding
>>to our comments.
> 
> 
> Damien is right.
> 
> Noone at Red Hat has responded.  Very few users have responded too.

You ask why users are not responding? From the tone of the messages on
this thread it should be obvious that they afraid. I thought about if I
should respond to this since last night.  But some have spoke up so I
will too.

But the real users of OpenSSH are not the people on these list. There are
the many users using all versions of operating systems that have OpenSSH
(and other compatibles clients and servers.) Many of these users
may never have read a line of "C" code in their life.

Many of these users use vendor provided versions of OpenSSH, provided and
compiled by the OS vendors.

We have been using OpenSSH since version 2.0 and got serious about it
when it started to support Kerberos, even if it mean adding mods
and distributing internally.

Now that OpenSSH-3.9 support the gssapi and vendors like RedHat, HP
and (I believe) Sun in Solaris 10 are shipping OpenSSH with the gssapi
compiled in, we will be looking at not having to compile and distribute
our own version. I know that we may not be as up to date as we have
been, but many more of our users will benefit.

> 
> Our opinions as to how to deal with this are starting to calcify.
> 

Sorry you feel this way. In my option your end user customers have
increased my orders of magnitudes over the last few years but this is
because the vendors have been packaging and distributing the binaries.

Your real users are the vendors today.


> Perhaps that is for the better.

No it not. You have a great product, and letting this ACSS issue
with RedHat get you upset is not good. You have the master mailing
lists, I am sure there are people from RedHat on the lists, have
you tried contacting them? Maybe you can work something out.


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> 

-- 

  Douglas E. Engert  <DEEngert at anl.gov>
  Argonne National Laboratory
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  (630) 252-5444