I've been using wine for well over a decade and I was not aware of it. I'm not so confident that your characterization here is accurate.
Everyone I know that uses wine just follows some youtube video to get some game working on linux. They don't spend a lot of time learning about the ecosystem.
i've been in linux for decades and listen to multiple linux podcasts every week and follow multiple linux communities. valve, proton, lutris, wine, all of these things are mentioned constantly. codeweavers is mentioned almost never. it definitely isn't living under a rock to not be familiar with codeweavers. i would go so far as to say that most people who use wine have never heard of codeweavers.
I have to partially agree. When I started, codeweaver was hard to miss. I guess it was a different time back then? Must have been 15 years. For me, it was the other way around. My first wine experience was using codeweavers, and then I learned about wine itself. If you searched to run MS Office apps on Linux / Mac, codeweavers was the first result. Perhaps this was only true for Linux beginners. They had (have?) an easy to use commercial wrapper around it, with different Windows apps (especially office) working with no additional configuration.
I think you may be misunderstanding me to say that I was unaware that codeweavers existed, but that wasn't the issue. The issue at hand is whether "bottles" ripped that terminology from codeweavers. I have been plenty aware of codeweavers existence, but that doesn't mean I had any reason to believe they were the originators of using "bottles" to mean what it means today. What my previous comment intended to say, was that I had no idea codeweavers coined the term "bottles" and I don't know that it's fair to assume "bottles" assumed it was something exclusive to codeweavers.
Why would anyone assume that was some pseudo-trademark of codeweavers? It's not particularly clever and anyone could come up with it. I would've assumed literally anyone in the wine ecosystem could've come up with it and given codeweavers (nor anyone else) did not file for a trademark then that suggests they don't care that it was "ripped" from them to begin with.
My whole point of view is that there seems to be some assumption of malice or feelings slighted where there's no evidence that codeweavers feels slighted or that bottles was being malicious. I generally think the internet would be a much better place without assumptions of malice.
I'm sure Microsoft was familiar with not only windows on buildings, but also other OSes' use of the term "window" as a GUI element (dating back to Xerox Alto in 1973), and called their 1985 product "Windows" anyway, so there's precedent.
Microsoft literally researched every tech article about GUIs to extract all the terms journalists used to describe them. They then chose the most common word from all these articles.
They could have literally picked any other name.