Re: HiFn 7955 makes OpenSSH fail

["J.C. Roberts" <unknown@abac.com>]

On Sat, 31 Jul 2004 15:53:33 -0600, you wrote:

>> As someone who has physically walked into the HiFn headquarters in Los
>> Gatos CA, USA and talked to their VP of Marketing about getting
>> documentation and reference implementations for the OpenBSD developers
>> so we can provide free support for their products, I can tell you for
>> certain they are far less than "non responsive" to requests from the
>> open source world.
>
>Which must be why I do not have documentation to their newer chipsets.
>
>It makes no sense.
>

Yep, it makes no sense at all as a business decision. 

>At any point in time there is one open crypto chipset vendor.  Years
>ago it was Bluesteel but then Broadcom bought them.  Then it was hifn
>but things have gotten worse.  At the moment the free vendor is VIA,
>with their C3.

Mike, as Theo said above, currently the best supported crypto chipset is
most likely the C3 from VIA since they are the only vendor willing to
provide docs and reference implementations.

As always with the constantly flip-floping of vendor support, it seems
the best thing to do is if I try contacting them again. It's been a
while since the last time I tried.

If anyone on list is a customer of HIFN products, either direct or
indirect, I'd love to hear from you. The same is true if you're a
customer of a HIFN competitor (broadcom, via, ...) and choose a
competing product due to uninhibited open source (Open/Net/Free/DFly/*
BSD) support.

The thing that should matter to HiFn should be "customers" and if I can
present a solid case of customer benefit to them, they may just listen.

Of course, don't hold your breath. I struck out once before on this but
it would not hurt to try again.

JCR