After a discussion about OpenSSH got nasty on a newsgroup, Peter Naulls has decided to take down his Unix ports page at http://www.chocky.org/unix/. He says:

This has been removed. I'm currently fed up with the incredible negativity of the RISC OS userbase. Maybe it'll come back, maybe not.

If you want to help RISC OS in any way, then buck up your attitude and stop whinging.

Peter and friends have been responsible for working on many libraries and tools which enable them to port Unix programs in a very short space of time. This means that a program or tool that didn't previously exist under RISC OS can be up and running in as little as half an hour.

Although in the past I couldn't get myself worked up about the text-only browser Lynx, Peter and co. have brought us a number of useful programs, not least of which is the Nettle telnet client from which to run the other utilities. I've been waiting for a proper SSH client, something stable, easy to use, and ideally that includes SSH2 - OpenSSH does all that. As well as Peter's programs which are now no longer available his work was enabling other ports such as email clients, text editors and who knows what else.

I haven't read the arguments on the newsgroups, because frankly I got sick of the bickering a long time ago. So, I'm not saying Peter has a right to get away with murder because of what he produces, but frankly he's out there actually getting off his arse doing something useful, and as usual the nay-sayers - often people who do a lot of talking and don't actually produce anything useful themselves - are putting valuable work in jeopardy.

I wish Peter all the best in whatever he decides, and hope that at least the readers of TIB will show him the support that he deserves.