brainstorming: which formats to use and which to avoid

MJ Ray markj at cloaked.freeserve.co.uk
Wed Jun 20 12:55:07 UTC 2001


Werner Koch <wk at gnupg.org> writes:

>  || MJ Ray <markj at cloaked.freeserve.co.uk> wrote: 
>  mr> I seem to recall that SSH Communications threw a fit over people using
>  mr> the (trademarked?) name of their product to describe compatible
> I was not anymore aware of that.  The claims are ridiculous but of
> course we should use the term as used in the IETF draft.  

There's more at "February, 2001" on http://www.openssh.org/press.html
and on http://www.openssh.com/ssh-dispute/

Of course, many of Tatu's claims are slightly misleading, including
"It is completely free for any use on Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD,
as well as for any use by universities, charity institutions, or
private individuals for their recreational/hobby use (distribution,
with license, is available from ftp://ftp.ssh.com/pub/ssh). Thus, I
believe many of the reasons why OpenSSH was originally created no
longer exists."

The IETF information is at
http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/secsh-charter.html

> Trademarking a standard protocol name effectivly makes that standard
> useless.

Presumably, this was why they wanted the protocol itself not to be
called "ssh"?  Allowing it to become the commonly used term for it was
always going to be in their company's interests, in the narrow sense.
I don't believe they were prepared for the bad publicity in the
mainstream media which has followed, though.

-- 
MJR



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