Hacker News Reader

Comment by dataflow | Hacker News Reader

This keeps coming up and I keep saying that, if the issue is the leading term, they could've just called it the Windows Android Subsystem. (I suspect the real issue is that "for" makes it clearer this is a third-party thing, but nobody ever mentions that.)

View on HN

I believe Android branding guidelines explicitly only allow the use of it by third parties in the form of "for Android".

Android branding guidelines are very unlikely to matter at this point, given that it's descriptive use (not forbidden by trademark law in the first place) anyways...

This is Microsoft using Google branding. That isn't a risk worth taking, even if more Android access benefits Google

I don't think that's what descriptive fair use means.

> Descriptive Fair Use: Found at 15 U.S.C. § 1115(b)(4), the descriptive fair use defense protects your ability to use ordinary words to describe your own goods or services, even if those words happen to be part of someone's trademark.

https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/using-trademarks-others

Since the Windows Subsystem for Android actually runs Android, "Windows Subsystem for Android" is a product name and not just a description, and "Android" isn't a generic descriptive term in this context, it seems to me that Microsoft is using Google's Android trademark in a way that isn't protected as fair use.

Right, I should have said "nominative" rather than "descriptive", at least as far as US law is concerned. It's directly below "descriptive" in your link.

Really I wasn't trying to name the exact defence but gesture at the principal that trade marks prevent competitors from using names that might confuse customers, but they don't prevent competitors (or anyone else) from talking about the product. It was just a coincidence that I used a word that happened to also be the name of a specific kind of fair use.

Does Linux have the same branding guidelines? Because this started before Android.

That's actually sort of false! WSL was originally designed for Android, to enable Android apps on Windows Mobile phones. (I have a Lumia which has a test build of this from back in the day.)

I'm unsure when the branding decision was made, but the possibility of again involving Android support was probably considered.

Amazing! Thanks.

I am quite sure this has not much to do with Android, given that this, including the naming scheme, traces back to 1999 with "Windows Services for UNIX".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX

Funnily enough it lacks "subsystem" but its ancestor was in 1993 "Microsoft POSIX subsystem".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem

Here is a cite confirming that statement[0]

[0] https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/sipb/project/android/docs/distribu...

They should say "for Android apps". Boom. Makes more sense. I'm sure there are other phrasing tweaks that would also work.

But it's just like Microsoft to blindly settle on a name that doesn't make sense, based on advice from legal, and not probe it a bit more, or play with it to make more sense while still fitting the guidelines of legal advice, and to cite the legal guidance as the reason it has to be mediocre and cannot change. (Source: I once worked for MS.)

Edit: to be clear, I'm also reacting to the "windows subsystem for Linux", which they used the same justification for.

That is very terse and puts "Windows Android" directly next to each other which isn't that clear and could be trademark infringement

Someone at Microsoft must have considered "Windows Can Now Run Android/Linux/Mac". Wonder why they didn't take that or another route.

Windows Can Run <> or WCRX would actually be a killer name.

Indeed.

It's a continuation of their Windows Services for Unix naming scheme.

This.

Until and through Windows 2000, Windows NT had subsystems for various platforms such as Windows Subsystem for POSIX and Windows Subsystem for OS/2. The Win32 environment is also a Windows Subsystem: Windows Subsystem for Win32.

Most if not all of the subsystems were removed from Windows XP onwards, except for Win32, due to obsolescence but the architecture and scheme came back in Windows 10 with Windows Subsystem for Linux and in Windows 11 with Windows Subsystem for Android.

As an aside, WinRT is a subset of Win32 and is not its own subsystem.

“Windows bridge to Android” would have been a better choice

No that’s a very dubious take.

it's a subsystem, of Windows, for Android.

Windows Subsystem for Android.

it's not hard.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com