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Comment by chrismonsanto | Hacker News Reader

> Yes, you can. It's called contributing to a project. If the "half million lines of diffs" were actually things needing fixing, then the upstream team would accept them. If they are not necessary changes (such as ripping out all windows compatibility), then no, they would reject such changes.

I take it you've never dealt with an inactive/apathetic upstream before? Just because someone is the steward of a project does not mean they should be. This is perhaps one of the most valid reasons to fork!

The LibreSSL team says that there were big problems on the tracker that languished for years, such as OpenSSL not working correctly when you disable their custom memory allocator. If the OpenSSL team can't deal with bug reports in a timely fashion, what makes you think they will bother reviewing and merging hundreds of thousands of lines of code?

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Then you become the steward of the project and continue forward. Forking will introduce an untold number of new bugs, some of which may be worse than imagined. Right now, native libressl only works on bsd's, when openssl codebase works on many os's. There are ports being made, which will introduce more bugs.

Bugs being in a tracker for years is not uncommon.

Here's OpenSSH's tracker:

https://bugzilla.mindrot.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=__open__...

331 bugs, a large majority of which are pre 2012.

This is not a sign of inactive/apathetic developers. It's a sign of big and old projects.

I have no doubt the OpenBSD folk are excited about this now... but 5 years from now? More? What's the long term viability of this project? Will they eventually put all OS's on an equal footing instead of *BSD's first and port to other OS's?

Forking was not the answer. The answer was to fix the perceived problems in OpenSSL and make it as solid as it can be. It's splitting talent and resources unnecessarily. Especially when the two projects are under the same umbrella (OpenBSD Foundation).

> Then you become the steward of the project and continue forward. ... The answer was to fix the perceived problems in OpenSSL and make it as solid as it can be. It's splitting talent and resources unnecessarily.

But that is what the fork is, OpenSSL with new stewards. What is your objection? That they are using a different name? That they decided to remove certain platforms which were a maintenance burden? That FIPS is broken by design and therefore isn't a priority? I imagine the OpenSSL team disagrees with the LibreSSL team on all of these issues. The only option was a fork.

> Right now, native libressl only works on bsd's, when openssl codebase works on many os's. There are ports being made, which will introduce more bugs.

One step backwards, two steps forward.

Most of these are related to portable openssh and not openssh. These are two very different teams.

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