Microsoft gives up on developers and users who were angry that MS launched an open source project called GVFS even though that name was already associated with a GNOME project. Even after many developers and users explained the confusion of this name, Microsoft refused for more than a year to change the name of the project.
That was until yesterday when Microsoft finally agreed to vote for a new name for its project. Coincidentally, this change occurred only two days after the purchase of GitHub and concerns about this acquisition.
The story
Gnome is an open source desktop environment for Linux and BSD operating systems and has had a virtual file system implementation since around 2006 called “GVfs”. Since then, search results, forum and help topics, and tutorials have been referring to this name without confusion about what it means.
Let’s move fast until November 2017. Microsoft uploads a project called GVFS to GitHub, which means “Git Virtual File System”. This project is completely different and is used to allow extremely large git repositories, such as Windows source code, to work well in the Git source code version control system.
Once Microsoft launched this project, it quickly outperformed the original GNOME GVfs project in the search ranking and began to cause confusion for some who were looking for information about the GNOME project.
Feedback from developers and users
When the developers saw this, they opened a ticket on the Microsoft GVFS project page to express their concern that the Microsoft name would confuse people, as it is the same as the well-established GVfs project. They then asked Microsoft to choose a different name to avoid confusion.