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Comment by claudius | Hacker News Reader

What is the license of these patches? There doesn’t seem to be anything on the website, nor in all of the patches available for download.

Are there other reasons apart from licensing why this has not been merged into mainline OpenSSH?

Edit: At least the multithreaded AES-CTR cipher has license information in the header, which seems to be standard BSD. It stands to reason that the rest of the patches have the same license?

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The Sourceforge page says the project is BSD-licensed. But if the license isn't applied to all the files, and no other root-directory file says that all the files contained within are licensed as such, i'm pretty sure you're not legally covered. If I were a distro I wouldn't include these without asking the authors to put a license declaration covering all the patch changes at the beginning of the file.

I am the author. Honestly, I initially released them without any sort of license - entirely free from any sort of license restriction. People don't seem to understand that so I said they have a BSD license on them. Personally, the license is kind of a moot point (in my view) as the once you patch OpenSSH with them the code is subsumed by the license used by OpenSSH. The only but that might be up in the air is the aes-ctr cipher. In any case I'm trying to find the cycles to include the license and then incorporate it into all of the bits and then build new packages for sourceforge. In the mean time, take my word (as the author) regarding the license. It's free and open. Just keep the attribution. Send me mail at hpn-ssh@psc.edu for identity confirmation if you like.

I wrote an email to the HPC-SSH team and got the following response:

> I'm at a conference this week so I'll make the license more clear next week in the repo. Basically, it's a very lax bsd style license. Maintain attribution and you can do as you like with it. However, please understand that when incorporated into OpenSSH the OpenSSH license takes precedence.

> Also out had been submitted some years ago but there was resistance to the patch for non technical reasons so I've home my own way on it.

> Chris

I'm not sure about that.

I think that it was merged into FreeBSD a while back though: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=224638

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