[mosh-devel] Termius + Mosh

Tue Jul 12 12:40:10 EDT 2022

Hello Roman,

In 2017 in this thread, we requested, and you agreed, that your company
would stop using "Mosh" to refer to Termius, and use a phrase like
"Mosh-compatible" if you want to explain its ability to interoperate with
mosh-server. (You have told us that Termius is a clean-room implementation
unrelated to the Mosh codebase.) Despite this, you are still using "Mosh"
in your marketing (https://www.termius.com/) and perhaps in your product.

This is continuing to confuse your users, resulting in a continuing support
burden on us.

Stop using "Mosh." It is a registered trademark referring to our software.
Please let us know when this is done.

-Keith

On Wed, Aug 30, 2017 at 6:12 PM Roman Kudiyarov <roman at termius.com> wrote:

> Hi Keith,
>
>
>
> On 9 August 2017 at 11:51:44 AM, Keith Winstein (keithw at cs.stanford.edu)
> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
> Thanks for your answer. I see your point.Please don’t worry about the
> support as we doing it ourselves. We have Mosh integrated into iOS and
> Android with around 500,000 users combined. At the moment we can see quite
> a big adoption of Mosh and some user requests in our Helpdesk system. At
> the same time I can see none of those in this mailing list.
>
> I believe that the idea/concept of Mosh is much bigger than it’s first
> implementation under the GPL license. The GPL license makes it’s hard to
> use in commercial apps so there will be more alternative and/or
> closed-sourced implementations of the protocol which most of the users call
> Mosh(not SSP).
>
> One of the solutions I can see is to name the current implementation Open
> Mosh and keep the name mosh for the protocol.
>
> Another topic that I would like to raise is the protocol collaboration so
> Termius can keep up with the new versions of the Mosh server and release
> updates together with other platforms. That would definitely benefits the
> users.
>
>
>
> -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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