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Putty maintainer on his attitude towards security and open source

andrewducker.dreamwidth.org

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Re: Putty maintainer on his attitude towards security and open source

#61

Post by toast0 »

AndrewDucker wrote: post #39
bityard wrote: post #36

These days, there seems to be (at least) two kinds of open source software developers: 0. Those who release their code under an open source license, in the hope that it will be useful to others in some way. 1. Those who do the same as above, with the additional hope that they will be paid for in some ill-defined way. And when they are not, take to twitter and blogs to proclaim, "somebody should really do something ab…

I do think there is a real problem whereby very important code that a lot of people and systems depend on is looked after part time (or not at all) and nobody thinks about it until it has a severe bug. But that's almost orthogonal to the issue of whether the original developer should be paid because their code turns out to be useful to lots of people.

It's also orthogonal to whether the code is free or paid, open or closed.

Plenty of commercial code is barely looked after, and if it's closed and broken, it's a lot harder to fix.

Re: Putty maintainer on his attitude towards security and open source

#62

Post by varajelle »

I've been paid to (help) maintain an open source project by a company that also offer services and support around that project. When someone report a bug on GitHub, then the bug is triaged and prioritized for both paying customer and open source users. But sometimes open source users would just ask questions in the GitHub bug tracker. Then I'd just close the issue and provide a link to the official support channels (sometimes also answering the question if that's easy enough, but not if I have to ask more info or if I have to search for the answer). Same when open source users would just ask questions by email.

Re: Putty maintainer on his attitude towards security and open source

#63

Post by thrower123 »

betwixthewires wrote: post #45
nijave wrote: post #23

I also find the opposite true--reminding colleagues that using OSS means we have to own and maintain the software whether the original community/author does or not. There seems to be a hesitance to fork abandoned or slow moving software to update/fix issues

I think this is an important point that is often overlooked. When we release code under a free software license, we are giving the software to the user, entirely. If you're using software that you own, not just merely have a license to, it is yours, be prepared to maintain it, and if you're not prepared to maintain it, maybe relying on free-as-in-freedom software is a bad decision for you.

Code released under MIT and BSD licenses should really be thought of not as free, as in speech, or free, as in beer, but free, as in mattress on the side of the road.

Re: Putty maintainer on his attitude towards security and open source

#65

Post by AndrewDucker »

camtarn wrote: post #60
AndrewDucker wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, Simon drops by occasionally and leaves a comment if he fancies. This one was so good I thought it was worth sharing more widely.

It's pretty darn weird realising that Simon is actually a person who knows somebody I've met IRL, rather than a mysterious benevolent entity responsible for manifesting the PuTTY suite fully-formed upon the internet ;)

I think I bumped into Simon through a bunch of other Cambridge people I chanced onto via Dreamwidth/Livejournal. I wouldn't say we were even slightly close, but if I was living closer to Cambridge and there wasn't a pandemic he's definitely amongst the people I'd be delighted to say hi to in person.

Re: Putty maintainer on his attitude towards security and open source

#66

Post by hutzlibu »

nijave wrote: post #23

I also find the opposite true--reminding colleagues that using OSS means we have to own and maintain the software whether the original community/author does or not. There seems to be a hesitance to fork abandoned or slow moving software to update/fix issues

"reminding colleagues that using OSS means we have to own and maintain the software whether the original community/author does or not"

No, we do not have to do this. We wouldn't get anything done, if we tried to maintain our full oss stack. Where would you start? In the linux kernel and move your way up to chromium/firefox? Have fun out there.

"There seems to be a hesitance to fork abandoned or slow moving software to update/fix issues "

And it is often easier to reimplement something from scratch, than taking up some underdocumented mess and trying to make sense of it.

So I would rephrase that to

" using OSS means we can own and maintain the software whether the original community/author does or not."

Re: Putty maintainer on his attitude towards security and open source

#67

Post by kbenson »

vbezhenar wrote: post #38
laumars wrote: post #27

I once used PuTTY as the base for an internal SSH tool. We needed to provide data entry teams with access to a green screen but didn’t want to expose any more servers than what they were authorised to use and a simple interface because a lot of the data entry guys were technologically illiterate. After spending hours looking for solutions that were purpose built for this kind of thing I gave up took PuTTYs source and…

For me putty is still preferred way to ssh with Windows. Nowadays windows is shipping openssh.exe, so I can run it from cmd and it kinda works for quick simple actions, but clipboard works weirdly, basically I have to use right-click/paste to reliably paste data, shift+insert works in some apps and does not work in others. Putty just works like it worked 10 years ago, it's good old reliable tool.

The new windows terminal allows you to change how copy and paste work.

I recently switched from about 20 years of Putty use (some years more than others, I ran Linux on the desktop for a long time) to Windows Terminal and the windows included openssh. There are pros and cons. The new windows terminal is very nice but there's still a few annoyances. Having an actual ssh config and almost all the capabilities (no ControlMaster/ControlPath because no files as sockets) is very nice.

I probably would have been fine staying with Putty though if pageant hadn't started having reliable (but weird) problems when handling more than a few auths from remote in a short period, making Ansible unusable when running from my work VM with agent forwarding.

Re: Putty maintainer on his attitude towards security and open source

#68

Post by collaborative »

laumars wrote: post #27

I once used PuTTY as the base for an internal SSH tool. We needed to provide data entry teams with access to a green screen but didn’t want to expose any more servers than what they were authorised to use and a simple interface because a lot of the data entry guys were technologically illiterate. After spending hours looking for solutions that were purpose built for this kind of thing I gave up took PuTTYs source and…

A similar thing happened to me. But instead of tweaking PuTTy I tweaked Poderosa v4 which also has a permissive license

Re: Putty maintainer on his attitude towards security and open source

#69

Post by majkinetor »

doubled112 wrote: post #44
vbezhenar wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me putty is still preferred way to ssh with Windows. Nowadays windows is shipping openssh.exe, so I can run it from cmd and it kinda works for quick simple actions, but clipboard works weirdly, basically I have to use right-click/paste to reliably paste data, shift+insert works in some apps and does not work in others. Putty just works like it worked 10 years ago, it's good old reliable tool.

Anybody have a solution to get hostname completion in Powershell? ssh [letter][tab] gets me a list with my Zsh config. I looked briefly one time and couldn't find what I was looking for. I have a fairly large SSH config file, and needing to open it to copy and paste hostnames from the file is the main reason I just use WSL.

Whats wrong with using $Env:ComputerName ?

Re: Putty maintainer on his attitude towards security and open source

#70

Post by sorenjan »

kbenson wrote: post #67
vbezhenar wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me putty is still preferred way to ssh with Windows. Nowadays windows is shipping openssh.exe, so I can run it from cmd and it kinda works for quick simple actions, but clipboard works weirdly, basically I have to use right-click/paste to reliably paste data, shift+insert works in some apps and does not work in others. Putty just works like it worked 10 years ago, it's good old reliable tool.

The new windows terminal allows you to change how copy and paste work. I recently switched from about 20 years of Putty use (some years more than others, I ran Linux on the desktop for a long time) to Windows Terminal and the windows included openssh. There are pros and cons. The new windows terminal is very nice but there's still a few annoyances. Having an actual ssh config and almost all the capabilities (no Contr…

You can also save ssh connections as profiles in the new terminal, to easily open a new tab with a SSH connection to some computer. I use it to quickly access my home server.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/terminal/tutorials/...

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