I wonder if this author is aware that OpenSSL was once born from a different project, called SSLeay, started way back in 1995. Abbreviated history lesson:

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People today get pissed off because RSA got paid by the NSA to make crypto weaker, but try living in a time when RSA literally controlled the entire trade of tools used to run the web securely, and could just prevent anyone in the US from using SSL if they didn't pay for it. It's funny that actually all the people who originally worked on getting SSL created or its implementation into free software eventually worked for RSA. Ironically, back in the day NSA invested millions in a campaign to destroy RSA by offering its own competing cryptosystem as the new defacto standard.

SSL was basically created by Netscape through the work of Taher Elgamal, whose name you might recognize. In the 80s he created a variety of cryptosystems, many of which we still use today in a variety of applications. SSL was created with RSA's cryptosystems and patented algorithms to provide the most security in the fastest way possible for web users. Since all of RSA's algorithms were patented, nobody could implement them (for commercial purposes) without licensing it from RSA. Strong crypto (anything over 40 bits) was also still considered 'munitions' and not allowed to be exported out of the country.

Back then there wasn't a great big free unified toolkit of crypto libraries for anyone to use. The people who were writing crypto software either worked for a university, or a corporation, or a government, and thus all had the tendency to keep their source code to themselves, and code and libraries were licensed instead of given out freely. But a mini revolution had started from the ashes of the homebrew/shareware communities. People started to create free software and give it away at no charge, there were people interested in making web servers and the like, and they could all share one standard library (for things like crypto) so they didn't all have to implement one themselves for every project.

SSLeay was created in order to have a free implementation of SSL and its cryptographic algorithms that wouldn't be subject to US export controls. This was reportedly a "clean room" implementation derived only from documentation, written from scratch by Eric Young in Australia in 1995. It was then used by Tim Hudson in America (amongst others) to add SSL support to basically every free application that could use it, like telnet, ftp, ncsa mosaic & httpd, apache, w3c httpd, lynx, mSQL, etc. Both these men later went on to create commerial versions of this library and leave the work on SSLeay behind, and from that was born the OpenSSL project to continue where they left off.

At the time it was possible to create and run free software that provided SSL access. Actually, companies like Verisign - the only CA allowed by some browsers, for a while - had to make policy changes to start allowing certs to be generated for Apache-enabled SSL sites. But it was not legal to make free SSL-enabled software in the US because the right algorithms had not been licensed by RSA to use in the states. It also wasn't legal to export any strong crypto from the country. You could only use things like Apache with SSL if you purchased a licensed add-on for use in the US, or applied a mod_ssl patch for use outside of the US.

Browsers were in a much worse boat [because they all depended on RSA if they wanted strong encryption] and thus were largely commercial ventures. When Netscape released its source code for the first time under the Mozilla label, all its strong crypto was removed to comply with US laws. A new project (Cryptozilla) had to be created to link SSLeay to the sources. It was then that the rest of the world could finally download a robust, modern, open-source browser with strong crypto.

All of this changed in 2000 when the RSA patents fell into the public domain and the US relaxed its export controls on crypto software. Right after that, Mozilla bundled its own RSA implementation in its NSS crypto library, and the rest (for Mozilla) had nothing to do with SSLeay or OpenSSL. But SSLeay (now OpenSSL) continued to be used by software all over the world.

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There were a lot of different implementations of SSL/TLS with varying degrees of compatibility bugs. Most of the time a web server was developed in tandem with a web browser (or other similar client/server tools), and a library was created to implement the protocols they needed. This, of course, led to various problems between different implementations, even though if it was web code it was all using the same RSA toolkit for the relevant ciphers.

Even since those days in the mid-1990s, it's been obvious that a single library to handle all the weird implementations is both difficult to implement and very useful to developers. It's never been easy or bug-free. But even at the time, the library was written and re-written to get around things like export controls (the BSAFE SSL-C library was a rewritten version of SSLeay, by its original authors, so their new company could sell it as a non-US-based implementation of a US-patented algorithm).

Personally, I don't think it's offensive to the spirit of the original authors (or current developers) to suggest a fork or a rewrite. The main goals of OpenSSL are to have a free software implementation of SSL and TLS, and secondarily to provide a full-strength general-purpose cryptography library. It's not some abominable, indecipherable, impossible task to re-accomplish this. Hell, it was originally done by one ozzie by himself with just docs for reference. I think maybe the entire open source community can handle organizing a do-over.

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(Side note: does anyone else realize that the HTML <keygen> tag has been around since Netscape Navigator 3, and still nobody uses it?)