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Comment by dewyatt | Hacker News Reader

I think they could have picked a name that doesn't conflict with GNOME Virtual File System (GVfs).

When they picked the "Windows" product name, they could have picked a name that didn't conflict with the use of windows. Picking on an obscure file system doesn't even register in comparison.

X Windows

NeWS - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS

Remember the mess on usenet?

comp.windows.x.motif

comp.windows.new - not news about Microsoft Windows

In this particular case, the name is THE SAME (GVFS / GVFS). And they're both virtual filesystems, so there's lots of rooms for confusion.

I can image people at a forum:

"Hey, GVFS isn't working for me. It crashes with error -504" when I try to mount /nfs/company_data".

Try guessing which GVFS that is.

They used to choose very bad names like .NET or COM [1] (this predates Internet) makes searching information very tricky. MSDN doesn't help.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model

.NET is still rough naming-wise. We're porting a project to .NET Core Runtime which requires porting over to EF Core and ASP.NET Core (neither of which require being on Core Runtime).

Our internal libraries need to be compatible with the Core Runtime, so we have to have them target .NET Standard, which is compatible w/ the full .NET Framework or .NET Core. To target .NET Standard, you need the .NET Core SDK/CLI which includes the `dotnet` tool, which is almost never clarified as "the SDK/CLI" in documentation or in talks, but usually just ".NET Core".

Another minor annoyance: to build a .NET Standard-compatible library, you reference the "NETStandardLibrary" NuGet package. Makes a fair amount of sense, but is hard to talk about.

If you're running on Windows and want a smaller server footprint, you can use Windows Server Nano, which requires your apps to target .NET Core Runtime (not .NET Full Framework). Note that this requirement is not true for Windows Server Core. -_-

A few years ago I had to do some interfacing between python and some modelling software. I went through a COM interface, and it was a bloody nightmare to find docs.

I later found out I could have looked for "ActiveX" and found similar results.

A few years ago your best friend would have been https://www.codeproject.com . The issue of searching difficult questions using another keyword (e.g. ActiveX) is that you can miss the only answer available. For common questions (with answers!) you can find an answer with all the variations.

Their relational database is called SQL Server, which might otherwise be a colloquial generic name for an RDBMS.

They have a product in Azure named simply DocumentDB. I don't think "used to" is necessarily the best tense here (:

> NET or COM [1] (this predates Internet)

What could you possibly mean by that? The .com TLD was introduced in 1985, with microsoft.com registered already in 1991. Microsoft COM was created in 1993. (Of course, "the Internet" in any sense of the word predates all of this.)

.com was a command extension in DOS even before that.

And more fun, COM<number> is a special name, so you can't create e.g. a directory for COM2/3/etc. At least COM wasn't marketed like .NET.

That's what my first thought. "dick move". But they probably didn't know about it.

This is Microsoft. Before announcing a product they have more than enough lawyers to check the name for any clashes.

They just came to the conclusion thas GNOME's product is no threat and that they can just claim the name. Smaller companies [1] tried that before.

[1]: https://www.groupon.com/blog/cities/groupon-launches-gnome

I've built a personalized linux from the kernel up a couple times, and it never even popped into my head. Lets be fair to Microsoft, the nix world is vast, and not exactly easy to navigate if you don't live there. I live in all three worlds, and there are only so many letters. It drives me nuts when I just want a code name for a project, because I can no longer find unique words that aren't used by some project somewhere.

I mean, git itself did this in the beginning.

Microsoft, under Nadella has made me not hate Microsoft again, and that's a tall order because I'm over 40. This is an impressive move, and if they effectively execute all the bits that are possible here, this is just some great work.

(Oh, and I can't even use the word nix now as a catch all for all the POSIX/ POSIX(like) OSs because of nixOS.)

I think going forward, we just have to accept name collision.

> Microsoft, under Nadella has made me not hate Microsoft again, and that's a tall order because I'm over 40.

I'm over 40 as well, and I can honestly say I've never hated Microsoft or Bill Gates - what I hated (hate?) were/are their business practices.

I honestly wish I could (somehow) just get an apology from the company - something like "we were wrong, we're sorry, and we're working to make things right". Instead, it feels instead like a person you thought of as a friend, after they've put you down, did bad things to you directly and behind your back, you dropped them...then years later starting to do nice things toward you and others, trying to get back into your "good graces" - but never once apologizing for their past actions.

I want to see Nadella's and Microsoft's actions in a good light, I want to see them as an unvoiced apology. At the same time, though, if it were a person doing this, I don't know if I could trust their motives, not matter how sincere or enticing it might look like.

If you are anybody else could point me to a video of Nadella or someone else representing Microsoft making an apology regarding their past actions, it would go a long way toward me accepting their present behavior.

It probably won't make me ever install Windows 10, but I will probably see them in a better light.

Yeah let's apologize for corrupting governments. It will make it ok. Glory to the new microsoft, the proof you can bully your way to the top and with good PR, people will be ok with it in the end.

> But they probably didn't know about it.

GNOME Virtual Filesystem is first search result for "gvfs". Even if you use bing!

I understand that sometimes two products have the same name, but they usually have very different scopes/usages.

In this case, they're both called GVFS AND three of the letters have the same meaning, and they both do relatively similar things.

Even the tooling, and the output of `mount` is bound to be incredible confusing.

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