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> If OpenSSL wasn't the de facto king of OSS crypto libraries for so long (partly because it was the only one for so long), Netscape released the NSS library i
by the_why_of_y 9y ago
> If OpenSSL wasn't the de facto king of OSS crypto libraries for so long (partly because it was the only one for so long),
Netscape released the NSS library in 1998, and as far as I can tell it hasn't even changed its ABI incompatibly since 2000, but perhaps this is too recent for programmers to take notice.
- kbenson 9y agoI have no idea why NSS never got more use, but it didn't, for the most part. I assume there's a reason, but for the most part major adoption seemed to have been limited to Mozilla projects, Sun Enterprise Java, and OpenOffice (possibly because it also originated from a Sun project, and it seems to have enjoyed some popularity at Sun). If I had to make a wild guess from that info, it would be that it's more complex to work with, as odd as that sounds given the current context (although I guess it's possible OpenSSL got more complex over time, and was much simpler a decade ago).
- ibotty 9y agoFor one, NSS is not the kitchen sync that is openssl. With openssl you can do anything with any file you can get from the anywhere. Secondly, when using openssl-based servers it's usually easier to specify certificates and keys. You don't have to import them into a database, you only configure the filesystem path.