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 that means Multi-Adaptable User Interfaces; considering this, there’s a reasonable cause of confusion between these two frameworks.
As 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. According to our calculations, that was two years before Microsoft introduced this change in their product. The Maui Project’s code was initially on GitHub, with code commits dating back to April 29, 2018. Currently, the source 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 (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.
Subsequently, the Maui Project became a KDE project under KDE’s incubation program after the summer of 2019. And, just last week, we proudly announced the release of version 1.1.0 of MauiKit, the Maui applications, and the Maui Project.
We have since created an issue at their GitHub repository here: https://github.com/dotnet/maui/issues/34 (which has been closed, marked as a duplicate of https://github.com/dotnet/maui/issues/35) to resolve it.
Unfortunately, we were presented with what seems to be a glaring disregard for open-source civility by a couple of purportedly “Microsoft MVPs.” We want to believe that these people are not representative of what the .NET community has to offer; despite this, fortunately, an appropriate Microsoft representative offered to mediate the issue, which is appreciated.
We will contact them after looking for advice on this matter with the appropriate representation.
We believe this an unfortunate event caused by an oversight during the brainstorming session to select a new and appealing name for their product. And it isn’t an attempt at using the brand weight and marketing might that a corporation such as Microsoft and their subsidiary Xamarin possess to step over a competing framework. A UI framework that, as of today, is still the first result in Google when searching for the term “Maui UI framework.”
But that due to the ranking of GitHub (another Microsoft subsidiary) and Microsoft’s website SEO, in this case, their blog where it was announced, that will change over time.
We would like to kindly ask the Microsoft team in charge of developing this software to consider changing their product name. Suppose they were so inclined to use Pacific Island names. In that case, there are plenty to choose from, many of which the probability that another island name is the same as another free and open-source project is substantially minimal.
— Nitrux Latinoamericana S.C.