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It’s fun to see these posts but soo much backstory and history is glossed over and skipped.

OpenBSD developers used to have development sprints and code check ins in Canada to work around US crypto laws.

It’s hard to explain how big a deal OpenSSH was/is and how much we owe to the OpenBSD project for it.

Also the fork from NetBSD is way more colorful.



> OpenBSD developers used to have development sprints and code check ins in Canada to work around US crypto laws.

Yip, I brought OpenBSD CD set back in that era (2.4 release!) and asked in the order if it included the crypto lib's and got a hand written note with shipment saying exactly why they ship from Canada and no worries. Believe it was Theo who wrote that as well. This was mid/late 90's era.

Maybe I should dig that out and pop into a museum of some sorts, as a bit of history and unique.


A simple way to preserve it is to scan it and rip it and upload it all to archive.org.

https://archive.org/details/cd-roms


Excellent suggestion and added this to favourites as a backup reminder to do this. Hopefully be going thru that cupboard before the end of the year, so will get on that then. Thank you.

I do recall it was the initial release with blowfish so, that's pretty neat.


If you still have that it’s pretty awesome


> It’s fun to see these posts but soo much backstory and history is glossed over and skipped.

> OpenBSD developers used to have development sprints and code check ins in Canada to work around US crypto laws.

That is mentioned in the article:

Fortunately for us, the project was always coordinated from Canada by undisputed project leader Theo de Raadt. There is anecdotal evidence that US-based developers would trek across the border for hackathons with clean slate equipment to install OpenBSD while in Canada and hack — that is, work on the system — and would then legally bring the result back with them.


I think it's also worth noting Peter N. M. Hansteen wrote this article, he's pretty OG in this project


For me personally, the OpenBSD movement was a real eyeopener at the time. So I can not agree more about the glossing and skipping.

Unfortunate since there is soo much drama and progress missed.

Does not help that the "part 1" is missing from the link either.


The workaround for the RSA patent using dynamically loaded stub libraries is also kinda noteworthy.




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