Yes, it went well for Linspire, still it attracted a lawsuit, and the reason they didn'tlose wasn't because Lindows is different from Windows but because "windows" was a generic term already used as such by Microsoft itself.
I wonder what would have happened if the MS product was called say WinOS and the other one LinOS, where none of the terms are common words so that similarity would be the only matter.
Since they are saying it is 'for Linux' rather than it is Linux, I suppose they are probably ok, although the system doesn't contain or even work with any parts of Linux itself in any way.
Yeah it's the 'for' in there that makes it wrong. It's not 'for' Linux, it's for Windows. I know what it is and I _still_ think of it backwards every time I read it.
'for' is heavily overloaded as an English preposition. You are expecting a connotation of "for [the benefit of] Linux" versus the connotation of "for [the purpose of] Linux". Another example in English might be the relative meanings of 'for' in "this gift is for you" versus "this gift is for good behavior".
Other languages use multiple words or different cases for some of these situations. English leaves it ambiguous.
The fact that there are so many of us discussing it implies that it is a failure of a name. After all, what are words for if not communicating? We can debate semantics all day, but in the end, it's obvious that many people find the phrasing to be confusing.
it's the subsystem for running Linux. It's not actually Linux, and after enabling the subsystem you still have to actually get the Ubutntu image. That image is the Linux part.
Note that this subsystem never actually was "Windows Services for UNIX". That was another subsystem, another personality on top of the Windows NT kernel.
But that (a subsystem "for Linux") would only be referring to the small compatibility layer for syscalls and stuff, rather than the whole Bash environment which "WSL" typically means.
Or the needless confusion when everything needed to have .NET tacked onto the name.
Or after they bought Skype, and rebranded the unrelated Lync as Skype for Business. Not to mention that Lync is a homophone of LINQ, which was coming out around when Office Communication Server became Lync...
Or lately, when you had Visual Studio 2015, and what is now Visual Studio 2017 being called Visual Studio '15 while it was pre-release.
I'd argue that it's singular in the same sense that Williams[1] is singular, despite have origins which imply it describes a plural concept. Plus, "Windows's" sounds funny.
If you like, it's the same as the ways of running GNU on the FreeBSD kernel; there's Debian/kFreeBSD, which is Debian compiled against the FreeBSD ABI, and there's the Linux compat layer that can run Linux ELF binaries unmodified. Both of those are legitimately GNU/FreeBSD systems (or subsystems).
"Windows Subsystem for Linux", though a confusing name, is still better than "Linux On Windows", because the later would lead to LOW, which is unfortunately very true, in terms of performance, they just don't want you to ever think in that way.
Whatever name is better than "Bash for Windows", the worst possible name and the least tech-savvy way of describing what is going on. A real embarrassment.
They justify their choice saying they had a survey where the most popular option was Bash for Windows. Well, surveys also led to a boat called Boaty McBoatface...
"<anything at all> for Windows" would at least accurately express what operating system it runs on. "<foo> for Linux" on a program that is not for Linux is just awful.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13697918
[1]: https://www.andreas-jung.com/contents/dont-use-docker-in-git...