He's got every right to the trademark, of course. Other than being documented in books of law, Tatu created and released the first version of SSH in 1995. He has built a company on the product, and it seems that he has done his best over the past few years to make his company thrive and profit.

The letter that Tatu wrote was extremely polite. I give massive credit to Tatu for handling this situation like a human being, and not sending an army of lawyers after the developers of OpenSSH. It's not necessarily the protocol he's concerned with (although he does warn that SSH1 does have some severe problems that the OpenSSH developers are continuing to promulgate in their version), but it's simply a matter where he's trying to defend his trademark and his business in a cordial way.

As members of the Open Source community, we need to be able to respond to polite requests the same way we choose to make them. Meanwhile, I've read about a million responses to his letter, many of them screaming "We're working on an open source solution, screw off!". This is not a very good attitude to someone who owns this trademark, and will not engender an amicable tone in any negotiations whatsoever.

It may be true that most open source developers are ugly, hairy cavemen that preach from an ideological gospel. Many months ago, I referred to this "type" of Open Source developer as an ECB, or Evil Crusty Bastard. Just because you're an Evil Crusty Bastard, it shouldn't mean that you should treat other developers with disdain and hatred, no matter what platform they're developing for, or how they choose to control software they've created.

In other words, how can you expect people to have faith in your choice to work on Open Source solutions, if you have no respect for how they choose to license their software? This kind of insanity happens every single day, and not just with developers.

People running Linux and BSD tend to have the "My OS is better than yours" debate constantly. On USENET, on websites, in E-mail. It's constant. Meanwhile, these enthusiasts are the same people who got irritated at their friends who were running System 7 on their Macintoshes, who would pound the Holy Book of Macintosh. They exhibit the same behavior to Windows users and expect a different reaction. It's insanity.

We need to be more polite in how we deal with people, whether they're GNU/Zen masters or the unwashed Windows masses. No matter if they're running software on a mainframe or a desktop, on an x86 or a PowerPC. You catch more flies with honey, et cetera.

I hope that the OpenSSH developers come to a solid, good agreement with Tatu Ylonen, and everyone can move on with their lives in an amicable fashion. Just because you're working on an Open Source application, it doesn't give you the right to treat people badly. In an age where technology is becoming more and more of a humanitarian concern, try to remember that there's a real human being on the other end of the network.