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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

#81

Post by peatmoss »

sig-io wrote: post #24
johnchristopher wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why would his puzzle game collection waste someone else's time ? He's the one collecting the games or doing the puzzles so why would it waste anybody else's time but his ?

Because his puzzle-games collection are computer games you can play yourself, they can be found here: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/ Or in the appstore/playstore. My current timewaster is 'patterns',a nonogram puzzle

Interestingly, I JUST finished reading (many years after it was published) The Player of Games written by Iain M. Banks. In it, there is an orbital habitat named Chiark.

I assume that the interest in games and the hostname of his webserver are very much related.

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

#82

Post by GoodbyeMrChips »

denton-scratch wrote: post #51

It would be cool if someone would donate to him a domain. Downloading PuTTY involves relying on greenend.org.uk (which isn't obviously connected with PuTTY). You can check your download using the hashes provided on the site; but if the download has been messed with, then the hash is untrustworthy too. https://noncombatant.org/2014/03/03/downloading-software-saf...

Would the lazy bastards who downvoted parent instead do something useful and post a sensible rely? (Rather then keep turning this place into another Redit).

Link and text from the Putty FAQ below.

https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/faq.html#...

A.9.2 Would you like me to register you a nicer domain name?

No, thank you. Even if you can find one (most of them seem to have been registered already, by people who didn't ask whether we actually wanted it before they applied), we're happy with the PuTTY web site being exactly where it is. It's not hard to find (just type ‘putty’ into google.com and we're the first link returned), and we don't believe the administrative hassle of moving the site would be worth the benefit.

In addition, if we did want a custom domain name, we would want to run it ourselves, so we knew for certain that it would continue to point where we wanted it, and wouldn't suddenly change or do strange things. Having it registered for us by a third party who we don't even know is not the best way to achieve this.

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

#83

Post by codetrotter »

memetomancer wrote: post #54
Datagenerator wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This software limits the user with a maximum of allowed sessions.

The _demo_ limits the user with a maximum of allowed sessions. The unrestricted software has a modest licensing fee. Entirely reasonable considering the target audience.

That’s fine but why not just stick with open source PuTTY instead of switching to some commercial proprietary software.

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

#84

Post by lolc »

arka2147483647 wrote: post #78

This is a nice post from a healthy person who is comfortable with his position, and isn’t overburdened. However, what would happen if that were not so? What would happen if he Could not, Would not, or were Unable to work? It would all fall apart. And that is the inherent fragility in these small critical opensource projects.

Putty would keep running even if the maintainer disappeared. You can build it yourself. You can find somebody to maintain it for you. What's fragile about that?

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

#85

Post by xxpor »

josephg wrote: post #77
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #16

I thought this was such a fantastic response, particularly the sections where he talks about how he responds to companies demanding he reply as if he has a contract with them. The main point being that, with the log4j issue (and others before that), the thing that's struck me when maintainers complain about not being appreciated or that they are working as hard as they can, unpaid, is that maintainers are under no ob…

You can’t control others emotions. But setting healthy expectations goes a long way. One of my takeaways from the log4j issue is that the log4j devs should have never accepted the patches to add LDAP urls in the first place. Or perhaps, they should have removed that feature when it became burdensome. I would have. There’s a pressure to accept whatever patches come your way as an opensource developer, but actually, yo…

They didn't add ldap support explicitly though, AFAICT. They added JNDI support, using a fairly small patch the guy who filed the request wrote for them. JNDI is a standard Java thing, so I'd guess they didn't think too deeply about all of the things it could do (not criticizing them, I'd probably have done the same thing).

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

#86

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

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…

> And being a nix guy I don’t get much need for PuTTY in my day to day.

It actually works on unix, which is usually uninteresting but I used it once when I needed a serial console client and wanted a friendly GUI. So it can* be useful:)

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

#87

Post by nradov »

arka2147483647 wrote: post #78

This is a nice post from a healthy person who is comfortable with his position, and isn’t overburdened. However, what would happen if that were not so? What would happen if he Could not, Would not, or were Unable to work? It would all fall apart. And that is the inherent fragility in these small critical opensource projects.

Or someone else would fork the code, most users would eventually migrate to the new project, and life goes on.

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

#88

Post by ip26 »

boondaburrah wrote: post #58
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…

2. those that start out as 0, but become 1 when it turns out their software they hoped would be useful winds up /costing them/ in some ill-defined way.

Mainly, I gather, when users of their software start demanding support/bug fixes/enhancements.

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

#89

Post by wruza »

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.

I’m using WinSSHTerm instead (it joins putty, pageant, file transfer and multiple configs together into a very nice ui, and its terminal works as expected). It is like an IDE of putty-related tools. Putty may be a default ssh window to the unix world, but it’s ui never felt good to me.

Some screenshots to get the idea of its ui: https://www.google.com/search?q=winsshterm&tbm=isch

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

#90

Post by petee »

codetrotter wrote: post #83
memetomancer wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The _demo_ limits the user with a maximum of allowed sessions. The unrestricted software has a modest licensing fee. Entirely reasonable considering the target audience.

That’s fine but why not just stick with open source PuTTY instead of switching to some commercial proprietary software.

Mobaxterm comes with a few extra goodies, like having a local xserver to run remote programs locally on windows, and it works out of the box. It also supports VNC, mosh, and others, so its a handy all in one. I purchased once to support, and i flip between putty amd moba for no reason.
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