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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

That's being pedantic, honestly.

Let's try the opposite. Say someone got Wine working to the point where it was very nearly, perfectly indistiguishable from Windows and they put up a blog post saying "Everything works just as it should under Windows, because it is Windows." Microsoft's lawyers would come around with a C&D, and calling them pedants wouldn't invalidate their case.

He could have said "it's just like Linux, right down to the kernel interface" or "Everything works just like Ubuntu, because the userland is Ubuntu". Succinct and correct. Precision matters.

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Your points are fair, but color with the fact that the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is build to be distro-agnostic. We picked Ubuntu in this first version due to its popularity with developers, but there are few technical reasons (other than us fully and accurately implementing the necessary syscalls) why it shouldn't support other distro's userland environments in the future.

Knowing this, what should we call it?

Windows Subsystem for Running POSIX + Linux Syscall API Compatible Userland Tools? WSRPLSACUMT? :)

I'm genuinely interested on what you all feel would be a good way to think about naming moving forward.

There's nothing wrong with "Windows Subsystem for Linux".

But there's a difference between "This is Ubuntu running on WSL" or "This is Ubuntu running on our Linux compatibility layer", and "This is Linux".

> I'm genuinely interested on what you all feel would be a good way to think about naming moving forward.

I did actually give this some thought, for what it's worth. There are problems with "GNU" in the name and problems with "Ubuntu" in the name.

But it seems to me that Microsoft has a naming scheme that it is perhaps unaware of. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11417059 . (-:

> Let's try the opposite. Say someone got Wine working to the point where it was very nearly, perfectly indistiguishable from Windows and they put up a blog post saying "Everything works just as it should under Windows, because it is Windows." Microsoft's lawyers would come around with a C&D, and calling them pedants wouldn't invalidate their case.

Except that isn't the opposite, it's an entirely different situation.

1) It isn't Windows. It's a complete rewrite of the Windows API's. That is not the same thing that's happening here.

2) A C&D isn't a case, it's a piece of paper (politely) asking you to do something. Calling something Windows and it actually being an infringement on Windows patents are entirely different issues.

> Precision matters.

In carefully crafted theoretical situations feigning as analogies to this situation? Sure. In the real world? Hardly.

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