[mosh-devel] Termius + Mosh

Tue Aug 8 19:51:00 EDT 2017

Roman,

In early May, we had this exchange (also below in this thread). I wrote:

(3) We've had bad experiences in the past with people (especially iSSH on
> iOS) attempting to implement the Mosh protocol, but with imperfect results,
> and users blaming Mosh for the problems. As with these past cases, please
> don't refer to your implementation as "Mosh." Please refer to it as
> "Termius mosh-compatible mode," with your own name first and
> "mosh-compatible" instead of "Mosh".

You replied:

Sure, no problem. We will make sure that it’s mentioned as
> "mosh-compatible”.

We expect your company to honor this agreement -- do you plan to do so?

I'm happy to explain our position further, and maybe you can understand why
this is important to us. Mosh is a piece of software, like OpenSSH or
Chrome. The protocol is called SSP (State Synchronization Protocol). You
have told us that your program is not derived from Mosh, so we really don't
want your company to call it Mosh. It's nothing personal -- but users are
better served knowing the difference. We had a bad experience with somebody
writing what they thought was a compatible implementation, and users
getting confused and blaming us. So we don't want users to think they are
running Mosh when they are running somebody else's application.

We would be fine with you making statements like, "Termius is
mosh-compatible" or "Termius has a mosh-compatible client" or even "Termius
works with Mosh servers." They key thing here is that it's fine for Termius
to claim mosh-compatibility, or to work *with* Mosh servers. It shouldn't
claim to *be* or to include Mosh, because it doesn't.

Yes, the text "SSH, Telnet, and Mosh in your pocket" and "... with SSH,
Telnet, and Mosh." appears on your current website, https://termius.com.
You can visit it yourself to see.

-Keith

On Mon, Aug 7, 2017 at 5:20 PM, Roman Kudiyarov <roman at termius.com> wrote:

> Hi Keith,
>
> Could you please point me where “Mosh in your pocket” is. Honestly I can’t
> find it. Btw, we’ve recently updated both of our websites so you might
> refer to the old version.
>
> In terms of the naming, there are two entities called MOSH:
> 1. *Mosh protocol*. Termius is keen to participate in the discussion of
> the protocol development. We have some thoughts on improving UX, e.g live
> sessions for quick switch between devices.
> 2. *Server and client implementation* of the protocol which is available
> on GitHub.
>
> In general, I find mosh-compatible pretty long and a little bit confusing
> as it’s just a proprietary implementation of the mosh protocol, e.g. there
> are many implementation of the SSH protocol. In addition, we can’t fit in
> in Apple App Store description, e.g. Termius - SSH, Mosh-compatible and
> Telnet client.
>
> In terms of the support requests, we are subscribed to the mosh-devel
> channel and happy with answering questions related to our implementation.
> Btw, we have UserVoice integrated into our apps so we see most of the
> requests right there.
>
> On 7 August 2017 at 7:48:41 PM, Keith Winstein (keithw at cs.stanford.edu)
> wrote:
>
> Hello Roman,
>
> As we requested earlier (below in this thread), could you please refer to
> your software as "mosh-compatible" instead of calling it a mosh client (or
> "Mosh in your pocket" as is on your website now)?
>
> Thank you,
> Keith
>
> On Sun, Aug 6, 2017 at 10:56 PM, Roman Kudiyarov <roman at termius.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi there!
>>
>> I’m glad to announce that Termius is a free mosh client for iOS and
>> Android. At the moment we are working on a version for Mac, Windows and
>> Linux.
>>
>> I wonder if it is possible to put a link to termius website from mosh.org so
>> end users have more options to pick up from.
>>
>> On 4 May 2017 at 4:46:24 PM, Keith Winstein (keithw at cs.stanford.edu)
>> wrote:
>>
>> Hello Roman,
>>
>> Okay, but if we can't see your code, we don't have a good way to start to
>> know if your implementation is "fully compatible" with Mosh (it's not like
>> we have a compatibility test suite for new binary implementations). If you
>> didn't implement it with clean-room approach and were referencing the Mosh
>> code as you wrote your own implementation, we can't tell you if your
>> program is a derivative of Mosh or not. I do appreciate your kind words
>> about Mosh.
>>
>> Sincerely,
>> Keith
>>
>> On Wed, May 3, 2017 at 6:45 PM, Roman Kudiyarov <roman at termius.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Keith!
>>>
>>> On 2 May 2017 at 6:40:20 AM, Keith Winstein (keithw at cs.stanford.edu)
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Thanks for letting us know!
>>>
>>> (1) Could you please describe the process you used to develop a
>>> clean-room implementation of the Mosh protocol? Did you write up a protocol
>>> specification based on the Mosh source code, and then have somebody else
>>> implement the spec? If so, would you be willing to share the protocol spec?
>>>
>>> Writing the spec would be ideal scenario but we just used the original
>>> source code to learn the protocol and developed our own implementation from
>>> scratch using different set of libraries and frameworks.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> (2) Is the source code of your implementation available?
>>>
>>> We are not sure about making it open-source as we are going to use as
>>> our competitive advantage and we’ve invested quite a lot of time to get to
>>> this point.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> (3) We've had bad experiences in the past with people (especially iSSH
>>> on iOS) attempting to implement the Mosh protocol, but with imperfect
>>> results, and users blaming Mosh for the problems. As with these past cases,
>>> please don't refer to your implementation as "Mosh." Please refer to it as
>>> "Termius mosh-compatible mode," with your own name first and
>>> "mosh-compatible" instead of "Mosh".
>>>
>>> Sure, no problem. We will make sure that it’s mentioned as
>>> "mosh-compatible”.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>> Keith
>>>
>>> On Sun, Apr 30, 2017 at 3:34 PM, Roman Kudiyarov <roman at termius.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi all!
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I’m a co-founder of Crystalnix. We work on Termius, cross-platform SSH
>>>> client (iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, Linux and Chrome). Now we have around
>>>> 200K of monthly users! Our team aims to redesign command line UX from
>>>> scratch. Your team has done an amazing job with the mosh protocol which was
>>>> one of the most desired features that our users have been asking for.
>>>>
>>>> We had to develop our own mosh client(completely different code-base)
>>>> due to the license restrictions. Anyway our code is fully compatible with
>>>> the current version of the mosh server. Very shortly we are launching beta
>>>> for Android and then will roll out to other platforms as well.
>>>>
>>>> That means that this amazing technology(mosh) will be available for
>>>> huge user base for free!
>>>>
>>>> I just wanted to share those news and say thank you for the job you’ve
>>>> done!
>>>>
>>>> Please let me know if you have any questions!
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Kind Regards,
>>>> Roman Kudiyarov
>>>> Termius Team
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> mosh-devel mailing list
>>>> mosh-devel at mit.edu
>>>> http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/mosh-devel
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>
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