Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by emilsedgh 3594 days ago
Microsoft is being hated because there's a double standard here.

If Linux tools used Microsoft utility names, someone would've been sued.

Microsoft used wget and curl `aliases` (while native versions were there) and not only the didn't get sued, they are causing problems for original authors.

Of course no hate for the engineers doing this. They are just doing their job and this is a tough compatibility issue they are facing now.

1 comments

> If Linux tools used Microsoft utility names, someone would've been sued.

In a universe where Wine exists, you think someone would be sued if they released an app with a default alias mapping dir to ls?

Wine implements a set of API's.

curl and wget could be considered trademarks.

wine also ships a regedit.exe, a notepad.exe, ... you can construe this as implementing API (it's usually the motivation) but it gets mushy. PowerShell has a curl also to "implement an interface", however loosely.