This refers to having an enterprise license for Windows. If you have such a Windows product key enabled, the OS name will show as Windows Enterprise or as Windows Datacenter.

The goal is to just separate the users into personal and commercial customers, because you would have to spend quite a bit of money for these Windows licenses and keeping such systems running.

But in practice, you can just attempt to connect to any system from XPipe and it will tell you whether if you need a license for that.

Thanks for your video showcase back then, it really helped the project get the initial traction.

The project was definitely rough around the edges back then. It held together somewhat but I would say it was around a 50/50 chance that it would work as expected for a new user. I think that has been the biggest improvement since then, the reliability and handling of edge cases so that the vast majority of users can now use it as they expect without issues. That was made possible with the help of the community which reported and tested all kinds of things I could not have done on my own. Having a community running a diverse set of systems helps out development immensely.

In terms of any authentication, XPipe doesn’t implement anything by itself. It will just delegates to your local SSH client. If you can set that up with your ssh client so that you can successfully connect from the command line, it should also work in XPipe.

Alright I guess that approach works.

But installing it locally should be much easier. It can also access connections through your VM via ssh from there.

It should also work in a graphical VM, but I assume that you have your tools installed on your desktop. E.g. your preferred terminal or editor since you only have a console in your VM via ssh.

If you install XPipe on your desktop, it can connect to the VM from there and through the VM also connect to all your other servers as a gateway.

It’s intended to be installed on your local desktop because it integrates with your installed programs like your system shell, text editor, terminal, etc. This would not be possible if it would be installed in a container or VM. I can understand some concerns about installing software on you local machine, but this is a case where creating an isolated container for an application would not make sense.

That is great to hear!

Alright, I will have to look into whether it is possible to differentiate between normal and FIPS here

Yes

That is great to hear!

For MobaXTerm you can always try to ask the devs to maybe expose the functionality to launch their terminal from the command-line. That would work.

Do you use the normal one or the FIPS one? Maybe I can use that to differentiate between personal and commercial use

Alright I see. With the more professional homelab setups it will be always difficult to properly differentiate all cases for the community and professional edition here.

But you can send me an email at crschnick@xpipe.io, I can provide you with an evaluation license.

It should be close to the CommonMark spec, so it should support the same features as you find e.g. in GitHub markdown.

I assumed that yubikeys would be found pretty much only in enterprise environments but perhaps I was wrong there.

Maybe I can find a solution to that. The free plan restrictions are not perfect yet and I was planning to experiment with different solutions to it. If you just want to try it out, I can also offer evaluation licenses if you’re interested.

You can if you’re interested in any status updates

Yeah I can do that

It is a frontend for standard CLI tools yes, but it comes with many additional features. The focus is especially on integrating standard CLI tools with your desktop environment and other applications that you use like editors or terminals.

For example, of course you can just use the ssh CLI to connect to your server and edit files. But with XPipe you can do the same thing but more comfortably. You can source passwords from your local password manager CLI, automatically launch terminals with the SSH session, edit remote files with your locally installed text editor, and more.

Of course you can do this also with tools like putty, but the difference here is the integration. Other tools ship their own SSH client with its own capabilities, features, and limitations. They also have their own terminal. XPipe preserves full compatibility with your local SSH client and terminal. E.g. all your configuration options are properly applied, your configs are automatically sourced, any advanced authentication features like gpg keys, smartcards, etc. work out of the box.

The same approach is also used for the integrations for docker, podman, LXD, and more, so you can use it for a large variety of use cases.

Yeah the commercialization model is not perfect yet. Ideally the community edition should include all normal features required for personal use. Would that only be like one machine to connect to or many? I was planning to experiment with allowing a few connections where a license would be required in the community version.

Yeah I can understand why some people feel that way. Originally this closed part only concerned a very small part, but due to necessary subclassing of that implementation, that kinda evolved to the whole shell handling interface. I always wanted to refactor that aspect and decouple it such that these parts can be included in this repository, but never got around to it.

Maybe in the future this can be properly addressed because it’s more a matter of a not well thought out structure rather than hiding crazy secret implementation details. The whole project’s vision moved around quite a lot and most stuff was conceptioned before there was even a thought to try to sell it.

I see your points. In the end it boils down to the fact that there is no clear split between free and paid features in the codebase itself due to the chosen commercialization model. The paywall that is in place right now is mostly artificial because the code is the same for all systems. So even if I wanted to, I could not implement the classic open core model with a fully open source base version. I could have used a different approach to start out, e.g. only locking certain features behind a license and not certain remote systems like it is currently done. That would have probably allowed me to implement the more classic open core model. But the current model also has its advantages in other areas.

You can just ship your own version of the repo if you want due to the apache license. To properly run this the user would however still need the regular xpipe installation which contains some parts that you would still need to properly make use of it. I think the term basic core functionality can be interpreted differently here. So if you are talking about being able to use all the nice features that make xpipe stand out, then yes these non-open-source components are necessary for core functionality. If you are just talking about being able to run the application and do limited things with it, then they are not.

Yeah maybe the term open core is not the best way to describe it as it doesn’t entirely fit the pattern. I’m open for better suggestions where I can still somehow highlight that most of the application is open source (in terms of LOC, it is around 90% in that repo)