Summary: Microsoft is hijacking the names and brands of its direct competition; this is not an accident or a mere coincidence, it is part of a well-planned and longstanding tradition of battling by false association

WE are doing the best we can to stay focused and deal with the important topics. Microsoft is meanwhile googlebombing the news; those who follow "Linux" news will know what we talk about. We've come to the conclusion that the best way to deal with it is not to even mention it, even negatively, as any attention would serve Microsoft's agenda by mentioning brands like "Edge" or "Azure" or "Vista 10".

Our series about Windows in hospitals is quite popular; some readers can relate and have come across similar incidents. Truth be told, hospitals would be vastly better off with BSDs and robust GNU/Linux distributions at the back end as well as the front end. The 'choice' of Windows is largely political (or led by moles) and Microsoft is currently trying to blur the gap, making it hard to distinguish between GNU/Linux and some malware with keylogging. They want GNU/Linux to also push proprietary non-standards like DirectX. That really says a lot about Microsoft's true agenda. It has nothing to do with loving "Linux"; it's about love of Azure, SQL Server, Office and DirectX. We can see that the Linux Foundation now lends a hand to the openwashing of Office as well. It's grotesque, but so was the Foundation this past few years. It's actively working to undermine GNU/Linux, based on its very actions.

"It's part of the Microsoft-mastered decades-long tradition of diluting if not 'stealing' the competition's brands."Rest assured, we want to stay focused and not fall for the trap; our Daily Links will be 100% sanitised of all that Microsoft spam. Our series about Windows in hospitals will resume shortly.

Honest GNU/Linux news sites ought not cooperate with this googlebombing campaign of Microsoft, trying to own not only its own brand but others' brands. Vis-a-vis branding, watch what Microsoft has just done [1,2]. It's part of the Microsoft-mastered decades-long tradition of diluting if not 'stealing' the competition's brands. ⬆

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. Official Statement Regarding Xamarin.Forms rebranding as MAUI

     Today May 19, 2020, we were notified by a couple of users at the KDE Maui Project Telegram channel about a name change of a Microsoft product, the UI framework previously known as ‘Xamarin.Forms’ was rebranded as MAUI (Multi-platform App UI ). This name change is unfortunate as there is an existing project called Maui; evidently, we are referring to the Maui Project (https://mauikit.org/). The word “Maui” often capitalized as MAUI in the Maui Project is also an acronym, and it means Multi-Adaptable User Interfaces taking this as consideration; there’s a reasonable cause of confusion between these two frameworks.
   
   As it is the case, both are UI frameworks to create cross-platform applications, which does not help the situation. We created the Maui Project in 2018, announcing it for the first time on June 10 of the same year, as per our calculations, that is two years before Microsoft introduced this change into their product. The Maui Project’s code was initially at GitHub, and it has code commits dating back to April 29, 2018. Currently, the code of MauiKit and the Maui applications lives on KDE Invent.
   
   Even going back as far as checking the registration of the original domain https://maui-project.org which dates back to 2018-05-06 and the current domain (which is under KDE infrastructure) https://mauikit.org which dates back to 2018-09-21, it’s relatively easy to observe that the Maui Project predates this rebranding by Microsoft.





2. Microsoft And A KDE Project Spar Over "MAUI"