[OT] on windowing system names

[paul . stoeber]

On Wed, Jun 19, 2002 at 11:12:09AM -0400, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> >           ... is also useful for Windows users ...
> >
> >       since fencepost is, I am pretty sure, a system that can run X,
> >       which is a windowing system, I am not 100% sure that the
> >       documentation writer actually means
>
> I think the use of a capital together with the particular grammatical
> construct used makes it clear that this use of the word `windows'
> refers to a proper name rather than to the general concept of a window.
> I'm surprised that anybody would be confused.
>
> >       Windows.  (The Microsoft Corporation has spent a great deal of
> >       effort in trying to deny the everyday meaning of the word
> >       `Windows' in the context of computers, going so far as to obtain
> >       a trademark on the word.)
>
> I can only agree that this is a serious issue and that maybe we
> should try and do something about it (including rewriting the
> above sentence, if some other formulation can be found), but that
> still doesn't make the above sentence ambiguous in my book.

It would be even less ambiguous if it said

        ... is also useful for Microsoft Windows users ...

or

        ... is also useful for users of the windowing system
        distributed by Microsoft Corporation ...


On Wed, Jun 19, 2002 at 01:24:49PM +0000, Robert J. Chassell wrote:
>     Macintosh Windows, X Windows, or Microsoft Windows.

In many (most?) contexts, 'Windows' with capital 'W' means the windowing
system distributed by Microsoft Corporation.  So there's a camp of people
who insist on the correct proper name 'X Window System' (see any of the
X Consortium Standard documents) and who would be confused or disturbed
to see the substring 'Windows' in a reference to X.  (And I guess most
Apple disciples would find the term 'Macintosh Windows' absurd.)

Or should we now say 'X Windows' on purpose to deny Microsoft's claim to
'Windows' with capital 'W'?  OTOH, should we deviate from the proper name
'X Window System', only because there exists a "Microsoft Corporation"
that's doing no good?  I think people accidentally abbreviate 'X Window
System' to 'X Windows' because the immense popularity of Microsoft Windows
makes 'Windows' and 'windowing system' synonymous in their minds.