| Weekly edition | Kernel | Security | Distributions | Search |
| Archives | Calendar | Subscribe | Write for LWN | LWN.net FAQ |
X Windows
X Windows
Posted Mar 6, 2008 18:43 UTC (Thu) by PO8 (guest, #41661)In reply to: Red Hat's war on RHEL by JoeBuck
Parent article: Red Hat's war on RHEL
The problem with "X Windows" was that Microsoft explicitly warned the X developers back in the day that we might get sued if we used this terminology. Neither then nor now has the X community had the resources to fight a legal battle against Microsoft. The preferred usage was and is just "X" or "the X Window System". Following some recent court decisions, it is likely that the term "X Windows" is safe to use now. However, it now is seen as a sign of lack of clue in the community, so it's somewhat moot. "It's a Window System called X, not a system called X Windows." --late 1980s X Consortium t-shirt
(Log in to post comments)
X Windows
Posted Mar 6, 2008 19:33 UTC (Thu) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link]
> The problem with "X Windows" was that Microsoft explicitly warned the X developers back in the day that we might get sued if we used this terminology. Just knowing that makes me want to call it "X Windows." :-) I always thought "It's the X Window System, not X Windows!" was just a symptom of tight underpants. I didn't realize there was a legal reason for it.
"windows" is generic
Posted Mar 6, 2008 21:19 UTC (Thu) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]
Actually, it looked like "windows" was going to be found to be generic before MSFT paid Lindows $20 million to start pretending it's a trademark. If you want to start a company whose name sounds like "windows", there's some potential money in it for you. (I write "Microsoft Windows" instead of just "Windows" to mean the product -- without the "Microsoft", the "windows" is generic.)
X Windows
Posted Mar 7, 2008 7:51 UTC (Fri) by ekj (subscriber, #1524) [Link]
But that's nonsense. Microsoft would never have the shadow of a hope of winning such a case, and they know it, so they would never ever even seriously consider even filing it. Imagine the headlines: "Microsoft loses the rights to Windows!" Thing is, such a GUI is known as a windowing-system, and was long BEFORE Microsoft published any such GUI. When they did, they named it "Microsoft Windows", because that was the ALREADY ESTABLISHED terminology. The screen can contain many 'windows', each program runs in its own separate 'window', those are the generic terms.