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Comment by erlehmann_ | Hacker News Reader

To me it seems they only try to fix it because they got caught (and now publicly shamed).

Agreed. The first post from a PS team member was essentially "no, we don't want to do that, if you have a problem with it open an RFC" ... only later when it was plainly obvious that they were wrong did they agree to do the RFC themselves

How is it wrong to put an alias when wget and curl are not standard Windows applications? Sure a lot of people use them but it's easy enough to create a new alias.

Don't people have better things to do than bitch about an alias??

Perhaps MS had goals on their inception to make the commandlets behave more like the true applications then changed directions.

"Don't people have better things to do than bitch about an alias??"

Now that's a cordial and produtive tone.

I think the outrage is over the fact that MS broke any use of the command wget or curl and also, it doesn't even provide a compatible alternative to what they were aliasing ala busybox.

> How is it wrong to put an alias when wget and curl are not standard Windows applications?

Isn't that a trademark violation when a Big Corp is doing it officially in their software?

Are either curl or wget trademarked?

Yes, because all that is needed for something to be "trademarked" is for someone to use the term "in commerce" in a consistent fashion and to build an audience of expectation for what that word means in a specific region and context of discourse. When I see "curl", I know what that is: I know what it is supposed to be, and so it is trademarked in most reasonable countries. I assume your question is "did they register their trademark?", but one does not need to register one's trademark to receive the protections of a trademark, as that would make the law somewhat useless: the goal of trademark law is in many ways to protect users who are being tricked, not trademark owners.

cURL: https://curl.haxx.se/legal/thename.html, so it seems he has not obtained a trademark on this in the US and lives in Sweden, where trademarks aren't a legal thing.

wget: https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Trademarks.html

wget is a GNU project (now at least, originally?). They seem to (makes sense) have a thing against acknowledging trademarks period. So I'm not sure it'd make sense for them to even try to enforce a trademark should someone make a product named (or alias their product to the name) wget.

Trademarks aren't a universal thing, not every country or culture will have an equivalent concept, legal or otherwise. And if products aren't trademarked then claiming trademark abuse is inaccurate.

That's great and all but their alias does not support all the switches of wget/curl. I have both installed as compiled windows binaries on my machine and was pulling my hair out wondering what the hell was going on.

They're talking about changing it on the Windows version of Powershell too; I don't think it's something to be "ashamed" of, I thought it was a huge convenience - I knew that wget wasn't literally wget, but when I needed to fetch a webpage I knew the command to use without looking up Invoke-WebRequest or whatever it is and without having to go out and download the real wget.

I think taking the alias out is actually disappointing and a very slight change for the worse on Windows.

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