SSH Claims Draw Open Source Ire

JDStone writes to tell us eWeek is reporting that claims of OpenSSH not being an 'enterprise-class product' by SSH Communications, the creators of SSH, is being met with a great deal of resistance. Theo de Raadt, of OpenBSD fame and a member of the OpenSSH development team was quoted saying "OpenSSH is built into all Unix and Linux vendor operating systems, and is also built into almost all larger managed network switches, from Cisco through Foundry. It comes on Linksys and D-Link wireless and security routers too."

Comments

Well it makes perfect sense

[Psx29]

I'm sure SSH Communications stands to make more money if they can discredit a free, opensource product.

Re:Well it makes perfect sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, Theo de Raadt chose to counter his claims with "installed base" numbers, which do absolutely nothing to discredit their statements.

They claimed OpenSSH was not "enterprise ready". Pointing out that many, many enterprises not only use it, but build it into their products is a fairly compelling rebuttal.

They are either using their own private definition of "enterprise" that doesn't include organisations like Cisco, or they are lying. Either way, they are discredited.

What else would SSH Communications say?

[CSHARP123]

Byron Rashed, senior marketing communications manager of SSH Communications Security, claimed that SSH's product is better suited for enterprise-scale business applications than a similar open-source product from OpenSSH.

They are selling a product and they will say that to sell their product. Come on what else would you expect. This is like MS saying Windows is more Secure than Linux even though everybody knows the truth.

Re:What else would SSH Communications say?

[Husgaard]

They are selling a product and they will say that to sell their product. Come on what else would you expect.

We no longer just accept that corporations tell lies to the public. Now we also expect it...

Doesn't truth matter anymore?

Re:What else would SSH Communications say?

[Rodness]

Of course, "enterprise-scale" is a buzzword used by cathedral-style development houses who want to sell their products to "enterprise-scale" pointy-haired middle managers who have absolutely no idea how to parse buzzwords and hype with any degree of skepticism.

In my "enterprise", we prefer the open-source far-more-used-and-debugged combination of OpenSSH and PuTTY. SSH Communications is probably going to attack PuTTY next, spouting about how it's not as good as their shitty windows terminal either.

RSA PAM

[chowbok]

We attempted integration with RSA and OpenSSH had significant problems that we had to resolve and in the end we could not resolve the final problem which was a session would hang after exiting the shell if the session was authenticated using the RSA PAM module.

I had that problem too... we fixed it by turning on PrivilegeSeparation (I know the RSA docs say to turn it off, but ignore that).

In any event, that's a problem with RSA's buggy PAM module, not OpenSSH.

Re:Corporations are people ...!!

[Mr. Slippery]

They're groups of people. They get together and decide what to do. Usually the controlling body of shareholders says "do wtf you want as long as I make oodles of money".

They're not just groups of people, they are legal entities created by the state in a way that makes them unable to do anything but seek profit.

A business corporation that fails to screw over anyone it can in the name of profit can be sued by investors. Since for large corporations, those investors are often other profit-seeking-monster corporations, such suits would be a given if the corporation didn't plunder to within an inch of what the law allows - and even beyond what the law allows, if the penalty is less than the profit.

The modern large for-profit corporation is a Frankenstein's monster constructed of law rather than of corpses; and it's only by changing the law that we can tame these beasts.