[mosh-devel] Naming, was Re: Termius + Mosh

[Jim Cheetham]

Part of the broader miscommunication here (assuming good faith, of course) seems to be around the use of protocol names vs product names; using "SSH" and "Telnet" to refer to protocols and not products. The protocol name SSP isn't well-known, and currently the public recognise only the name of the canonical server software, which is Mosh.

In practice, people set up "an SSH server" and don't tend to remember the name of the actual server software ... OpenSSH for example, or OpenSSH-Portable, which most Linux distributions are actually using :-)

Mosh's own website says "Mosh is a replacement for SSH", which conflates the software with the protocol. Perhaps "SSP is a replacement for SSH"? Of course, SSP is capable of more than that as far as I can see, SSP isn't actually a replacement for SSH, but the Mosh application uses SSP in order to replace users of SSH ...

Naming things seems to be one of the hardest things in computer science :-)
https://martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html

And "mosh" is such an excellent name :-)

-jim

Excerpts from Keith Winstein's message of August 9, 2017 11:51 am:
> 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.

--
Jim Cheetham, Information Security, University of Otago, Dunedin, N.Z.
✉ jim.cheetham at otago.ac.nz    ☏ +64 3 470 4670    ☏ m +64 21 279 4670
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