Big companies are more likely to give back to non gpl code in my experience. The gpl scares them enough that when they use it they isolate it carefully so they don&#x27;t have to make changes. Non gpl code (depending on license terms of course) get embedded where it is easier to need changes and then a desire to keep up with some other feature means they contribute back.Of course either way they are a business and will be careful. Their core business will not be contributed.

That would not have helped MongoDB. I considered their new license, but it seemed tailored to their specifics. So maybe more research is required.Perhaps a variant of CC-BY NC would be better, but it is not tailored to code.

By Eben Moglen&#x27;s own admission[0], the GPL has never been successfully enforced in a court of law, even against criminal infringers.It seems toothless to me. A relic from a byegone era when companies cared about ethical behavior.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;philosophy&#x2F;enforcing-gpl.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;philosophy&#x2F;enforcing-gpl.html</a>

I don&#x27;t know the details of your project, but what if you open sourced under the GPL?I feels as though the world has soured on the GPL in recent years, but whenever I see this type of sentiment—that open sourcing work is just a gift from small developers to big tech companies, or something thereabouts—I think, wouldn&#x27;t the GPL solve that problem?Sure, big companies can still use GPL&#x27;d code, but they&#x27;re forced to give back as much as they take, which is exactly the outcome you want.(This doesn&#x27;t necessarily apply to the situation with AppGet, however.)

Depending on who you ask, ideas are still protected by intellectual property laws. Patents are a good example.

They might. But it is not as simple as WinGet. It would take a team or two a couple of years to reimplement. ML.NET is 2 years old now, still has very limited deep learning capabilities, and is barely visible in trend graphs.While they would be doing that, Azure will continue to lag behind (still does not even offer T4) on GPU offerings in comparison to AWS and GCP, because there&#x27;s no compelling reason to run custom deep learning workloads on Azure. Azure is loosing $$$ millions of potential revenue to that. It would be a totally different story if .NET folks would get full TensorFlow and&#x2F;or PyTorch in place of partial ports available now.

How much will that really change the likelihood of MS reimplementing it?They didn&#x27;t take any of the AppGet code, just the ideas.

That is exactly why I am not open sourcing my .NET bindings for TensorFlow.

How could a gigantic corporation stealing your idea be seen as negative?

I doubt it. I&#x27;ve hinted at in comments here in the past, but I have one such story. It&#x27;s a footnote, at best, in MS&#x27;s history, and a thing for a now-dead product, but they turned what I thought was a cool product into their own thing then disappeared it through internal MS politics.I don&#x27;t tell the story in any details since I don&#x27;t want those details getting back to the real me and having a negative impact on my career for whatever reason.

VCs and even incubators do this all the time. It&#x27;s one of their primary jobs to fish for information under the guise of helping you.

I wonder if one day we&#x27;ll know of all the stories of people who got wined-dined-fucked by the large corporations who then release their own version of an existing product.

What point exactly are you trying to make ?

Last time I checked, something being open-source doesn&#x27;t mean corps like MSFT can shit on them.

Not really. Afterall his AppGet package was open source....

The title of this should really be changed to the more descriptive subtitle: &quot;The story of how Microsoft embraced and then killed AppGet.&quot;

I don&#x27;t think so. There have been quite a few larger products, where Microsoft failed spectacularly.

&gt; I wonder if the arrangements and outcome would have been different had AppGet been closed source.All of the Windows apps that MS did this to back in the 1990s were closed source. Didn&#x27;t help. MS has more than enough horsepower to just reverse engineer whatever they can&#x27;t get the source code for if they care enough about the features.

&gt; And then, I didn’t hear anything back from anyone at Microsoft for six months.This does not mean he did not ask during that time.

My understanding is when MS decides they aren&#x27;t going to hire, they cut off all communication, total lot drop. Sometimes at their own campus, no feedback at all.It&#x27;s really an angering experience imo. I mean, I get it from a litigious mindset, but still not very humane.

Reminds me of: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;mxcl&#x2F;status&#x2F;608682016205344768?lang=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;mxcl&#x2F;status&#x2F;608682016205344768?lang=en</a>How exactly could a PM interview process (which is just asking you to walk through a bunch of design scenarios) give a stronger hiring signal than having developed a product the company wanted to acqui-hire? Honestly somewhat insulting that they made him go through a full external interview loop. At most it should have been some informal chats of the sort you get when transferring teams internally.

I did, I&#x27;ve since updated the article at the end to note this,&gt; There was an issue with my travel reimbursement, So I contacted the HR contact and at the same time asked about the Interviews, She told me someone will get back to me about that and they never did. This was on Feb 14th, 2020.

He was talking about the money was discussed even before coming into the interviews. This makes me think if he was brought to a sham on-site interview in the first place.

This isn&#x27;t secret news, but when you interview at MS there is always a secret &#x2F; hidden interviewer. This is publicly known information from Cracking the Coding interview. This person is called the as appropriate and you only meet them if you pass all the prior interviews.Per his writeup, he did not meet that person, which means that he most likely did not pass the interview.He also for some reason didn&#x27;t follow up on the results of the interview for 6 months, which is unique as most candidates will reach out. Assuming he actually filled out a job requisition, which he probably did to interview, he also should have gotten status from that requisition, so things are a little fishy.I do not know anything about his case directly, but I would bet that he did not pass the interview and a decision was made to not bring him on as a result.If Microsoft was trolling him to just pick his brain, they would have done more than two small events, and wouldn&#x27;t have bothered to reach out to tell him they were releasing a product.This response also burns any bridges that he had built with the team. He could have still potentially made something of his product if he had kept that relationship open and used his leverage as an existing package manager owner to influence WinGet.If I was him, I would have at a minimum asked for feedback far earlier than wait for 6 months.

Man, this hurt to read. Keivan’s response is the right one. But I wonder if the arrangements and outcome would have been different had AppGet been closed source.This is just not cricket from team Microsoft.

Are they also good at deciding when to copy? They could just have taken and possibly improved AppGet&#x27;s code.

We can find comfort in the thought that they&#x27;re not a Chinese company, whose copying kills kittens and freedom.

Microsoft is really good at copying. I mean this in as value-neutral a way as possible.

Reminds me of Stacker and Doublespace, back in the MS-DOS 6.0 days.

Microsoft is still the largest Mac software vendor, and they are again in the Unix distribution business with WSL. The more things change, I guess...?

You do realize that Microsoft Word has been on the Mac since 1985 suite and even the first Microsoft Flight Simulator was on the Apple II?Also Applesoft basic was derived from Microsoft basic?Yes, they did copy the operating system but that doesn&#x27;t mean that the Mac Platform is unimportant to them.

The really direct and aggressive negotiating from Jobs and Gates also makes for an interring read.

Windows NT is designed out of the box for extending and embracing Unix. The whole Linux Subsystem thing isn&#x27;t something new that required deep reworking of the kernel.

Neil Konzen&#x27;s P.L.E. (Program Line Editor) helped make my early days of Apple II programming bearable. It later was expanded into GPLE and published by Beagle Bros.

I love how those stories of the early years are so different from what I think of looking at companies today -&gt; Jeff picked me up at the airport, and we drove to Microsoft&#x27;s main building where we were joined by Neil Konzen, a talented 23 year old who was Microsoft&#x27;s main systems programmer on the Macintosh. I knew Neil from his days as an early Apple II hobbyist, when we collaborated on adding features to an assembly language development system when he was only 16.Just... &quot;Microsoft&#x27;s main systems programmer on the Macintosh&quot; is such a weird sentence to read today. On the other hand, Microsoft also shipped Xenix, a full-on licensed Unix™ OS before they shipped DOS.

The story reminds me of Andy Hertzfeld’s Switcher:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.folklore.org&#x2F;StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&amp;story=Switcher.txt" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.folklore.org&#x2F;StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&amp;stor...</a>The difference is that, in 1984, Bill Gates immediately offered $40k and Steve Jobs offered $100k for plugging a hole in their operating system.In 2020, Microsoft just strings you along on vague promises while they simultaneously rip you off.

I had to go back and look it was a while back, it took longer than I remembered it. The initial reach out was in May 2011. I had some initial conversation with them in May and June, sent them some overview of the company, etc. Then didn&#x27;t hear back for a while. In December 2011 conversations started back up. By then the company had actually launched a product where they could see my business being useful. I sent them some small amount of data as a sample. I had actually proposed a simpler lower cost proposal of them just purchasing the data they wanted and not the business or acquiring me to work there. Anyway sometime at beginning of Feb 2012, things started to move faster and then it was done by beginning of March 2012. So in my mind&#x2F;memory it was really January 2012 to beginning of March but really started in May 2011.

Out of curiosity, how long the process took until the deal was signed?

That&#x27;s what I was thinking. How would a company approach you if they were genuinely considering purchasing your product? And how if they want to brain rape you?Maybe being contacted by a product manager or engineer should make you cautious.

Not sure how MSFT usually handles it, but when I was acqui-hired (by a different large tech company, not quite on MSFT scale, but no trifle) I dealt almost exclusively with a person from Business Development. Maybe it is a bad sign that they had you discussing with people in their engineering group directly. Sounds like they were gathering data from you with no real plan to acquire. Then again every company may do it differently.For me, there were some questions about my technology, but not a lot. Mostly we agreed on terms, and then they came up with a 40 page contract :) (the bus-dev guy said they don&#x27;t really treat a small acquisition like mine that much differently than a larger acquisition in terms of contract verbiage). I had my lawyers (no I did not have any before this offer), review it.But overall I felt that someone, who later I&#x27;m pretty sure turned out to be the CEO, had told their Business Development guy, just acquire this thing (and bring him along if you can), so they just went about doing that and it came out ok.

I’m not sure I agree with that. No news is the equivalent of all other times: no deal&#x2F;no hire. I think the game theoretic optimal choice from a liability standpoint is to simply stop sending further messages if you decide not to do business with someone, especially given all of the current litigation-happy people there are out there these days. (Even if you win a suit, you lose lots of money.)It avoids the possibility of obsessive types getting agitated over an explicit rejection, et c. Anyone clever will see ghosting for what it plainly is: an explicit rejection.It’s just business, not some trusted friend ghosting you on lunch plans and not calling. This is how business works, and it’s not rude, it’s just the protocol.

Taking someone all the way through the interview process, then ghosting them, is doing something wrong.Add in the fact that they had planned on buying his app outright told him they would hire him instead to speed up the process, and it&#x27;s an especially crummy thing to do.

While I haven’t read the announcement from Microsoft, it seems to me that the core issues he had were in the downplaying of AppGet and overall lack of attribution, compared to other package managers with less influence:&gt; But the part that hurts the most was the announcement. AppGet, which is objectively where most ideas for WinGet came from, was only mentioned as another package manager that just happened to exist; While other package managers that WinGet shares very little with were mentioned and explained much more deliberately.He also mentions that he would’ve appreciated better communication. It doesn’t seem to have been about being “entitled to revenue sharing”. He divorced himself from that completely:&gt; Am I upset they didn’t hire me? Not really, after visiting the campus, I wasn’t too sure I wanted to work for such a big company, also moving from Canada to the U.S. wasn’t something I was too excited about.And&gt; I didn’t create AppGet to get rich or to become famous or get hired by Microsoft.

He needs to stop seeing ideas and concepts as “his” that are property that can be stolen.Where do you see that in the post? His pretty reasonable expectations are a bit of common decency from the other side - following up on emails and a smidgen of credit. There&#x27;s no entitlement to ideas or claims anything was stolen.

What makes you think it was a charade? Lots of (most?) interview processes end with “no hire”.

Then why in fucks sake do this acquihire interview charade? Just fork the codebase and be done with it!

When you release free (as in freedom) software, you are not entitled to revenue sharing when people use or modify that software, or if people use the ideas in that software to make new, from-scratch software.I think Microsoft is a terrible organization and will rejoice the day they finally cease to exist as a concern, but they didn’t do anything wrong here.PHP didn’t “rip off” Perl, nor did CoffeeScript “rip off” ruby. All the other PoW or PoS blockchains didn’t “rip off” Satoshi.He needs to stop seeing ideas and concepts as “his” that are property that can be stolen.Why should they acquihire when they can just reimplement?Ideas aren’t property, and if you have a good idea, and someone else takes it and runs with it and makes software used by millions that works better than if you hadn’t had that idea, that is the system working as intended, and, ultimately, his ideas, now published and infecting the world, being writ large and used by humans.I’m not some corporate apologist, but he should be proud. (He also probably should have, back when, started a company designed to be digestible that they could have acquired, if he wanted to participate financially, like MySQL or RedHat did.)

Reminds me of this scene from Silicon Valley (HBO): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=JlwwVuSUUfc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=JlwwVuSUUfc</a>

So that you don’t ruin your chances of being not ghosted by a company you barely want to work for.

I really doubt it was it. Sonarr was one of the topics we talked about during the first meeting at Microsoft Vancouver.Even if that was the case, I have no regrets.

Guilt by association.This kind of behavior stifles innovation and attempts to limit what people can do.

or stop attaching your real identity to online identity.

This.Choose your side projects wisely.

A distinction should be drawn that Sonarr does not actually download from Usenet or BitTorrent. It merely interfaces with other programs and apis that can do so.

&gt; Sonarr automates your TV downloads from public and private trackers (newsgroup and bittorrent)

No but there is bad press&quot;Microsoft is paying someone who develops piracy software&quot;The half assed articles from TechCrunch and such will cause a lot of drama around MS they simply don&#x27;t want.

There is no liability of a pre existing side project that they had no part in.

Large corporations often have more to fear from the liability of bad PR than they do from lawsuits. Most CEOs hate bad PR more than paying out a billion dollar fine — the billion dollar fine isn’t their money, and doesn’t cost them any status at the country club.

In the post, he says the deal was going to be getting hired and getting a bonus as compensation in exchange for him bringing AppGet&#x27;s code into Microsoft and leading the project. That&#x27;s a very simple deal in which no ownership of other projects is being transferred.I&#x27;m not a lawyer but I&#x27;m pretty sure that hiring someone doesn&#x27;t mean that you grandfather their liabilities. If that were the case the world would be chaos.If Sonarr was the reason to reject him then it was done out of complete pettiness.

What&#x27;s the liability, really?Let&#x27;s be honest, if it&#x27;s a concern they speak up and say shelving this is a condition of employment.

Pretty easy to understand if you understand how risk-averse big corporations are, and how the image of BitTorrent has been forever polluted by &quot;but, it&#x27;s copyright infringement!&quot;.Anything mentioning or using BitTorrent is scary for these huge companies, because it&#x27;s associated with piracy.Sure, your deploy times to your container fleet can be 70% faster, but if you&#x27;re using BitTorrent, it&#x27;ll be very hard to push that through leadership.

Why? From the way you were talking about Sonarr, I expected it to be something more than... a bittorrent organizer. It has nearly 6k stars on github and seems wildly popular. Why would that be taken as anything but a strong &quot;hire this person&quot; signal?I mean, I believe that it&#x27;s possible you&#x27;re correct. But this is just such a foreign &quot;does not compute&quot; situation to me. Is the thought process something like &quot;Sonarr is often used to download things against copyright law -&gt; that&#x27;s a no-no -&gt; we don&#x27;t do no-no&#x27;s here&quot;? I&#x27;m trying to phrase this as positively as I can, so I apologize if it sounds like I&#x27;m belittling the mindset or something. It&#x27;s not like that.(It&#x27;s mildly unfair to Microsoft to imply that this could be the reason, since as a company policy Microsoft can&#x27;t show up and say &quot;Well actually, the reason we didn&#x27;t hire was because X&quot; – and this seems like it would be an outstandingly bad decision. Old Microsoft may have made decisions like this, but in recent years they&#x27;ve made some pretty impressive reforms.)

I have a sneaking suspicion that part of the reason for the sudden radio-silence after his on-campus interview is that someone up the chain realized he is also the creator of Sonarr and just nobody wanted to take ownership of that potential liability.

I&#x27;d require earnest money at the outset.After Microsoft flirted with acquiring Intuit, then shortly thereafter released Money to compete directly with Quicken, I assume all due diligence is just a way to hoover up intel.To inform a buy vs build decision. To better validate market assumptions. To identify key contributors and poach them.Whatever.No earnest money? Fine. They clearly were going to drain my blood and powder my bones. Their prerogative. But they can proceed to kill me and my product without my help.

Yea, requiring consulting fees from big companies is definitely the way to go.Some open source guy wants to pick your brain: Sure lets get lunch and split it.Some small single digit founder start-up wants to talk abut your work: Ok sure, pay for my lunch lets talk about how I can help you change the world.Freaking Microsoft wants to talk: That&#x27;ll be 1k an hour plus expenses (also get a limo and a nice dinner).The humility of engineering should stop at the boundary between people who want to change the world and those who just want to profit off of you.

If the developer had asked for a retainer straight off the bat I feel like MS would have just ignored him and started building WinGet earlier. All the AppGet source was right there for them to look at. They wouldn&#x27;t have had the benefit of Andrew picking his brains one to one, but that probably wasn&#x27;t 100% necessary anyway.

You point is that this is simple, yet Microsoft with Thousands of engineers working over the span of decades never internally developed this idea or framework except after picking the brain of this particular person and doing a copy of that particular competing project.Paintings are just paint on a canvas, and all code is just clicks on a keyboard. That doesn’t make it any less immoral to blatantly copy without recognition.It’s perfectly fine to carry out a fork, the irony here is that Microsoft likely tried you play this angle of “we’re just competing, not copying you” because they thought carrying out a fork with attribution would blow up in their face, which this now has.

The code basically takes a .yaml manifest, reads where to find the package and get the installation instructions from an enum. I don&#x27;t think there was much brain-picking here.

Microsoft pretends to want to acquire a product or software and then release their own implementation.The developer was obviously brain-picked for any implementation ideas, as stated at scale. They should have been paying a retainer, or had an offer inside of two weeks.Let this be a warning for other developers.

GitHub -&gt; SourcehutVSCode -&gt; GNU Emacs

+1 for jetbrains. I prefer webstorm to visual studio myself and the licensing scheme is very fair.

ReasonML is a pretty decent choice. Small learning curve, JS interop, fast compilation, functional goodies.Plus a thing called &quot;Structural typing&quot; that gives you the flexibility of dynamic typing without losing the guarantees from static typing.

&gt;GitHubGithub I guess?&gt; TypeScript, npm,I don&#x27;t know if you&#x27;ll be able to avoid NPM, but _maybe_ you could try ReasonML if you&#x27;re doing frontend stuff with TS? Don&#x27;t really know tbh&gt; Visual Studio Code (besides Atom)?Sublime Text 3 with plugins for general stuff, one of the JetBrains IDE&#x27;s for more language specific work if so desired.

Are you kidding me? The Intellij ecosystem alone pre-dates vscode by decades and it’s likely much bigger already. And if you look at emacs and vim... well.

Depending on the language take a look at the product range from JetBrains. I use GoLand for example and it&#x27;s the best IDE I&#x27;ve ever used.

Gitlab is a contender for sure. I use it at my dayjob. 
I don&#x27;t know if any of the other big editors have caught up to VSCode in terms of ecosystem though.

&gt; githubGitlab, many other lesser known alternatives (such as the aforementioned sourcehut, although that has a different paradigm than github)&gt; TypescriptFacebook&#x27;s flow is probably the closest. There&#x27;s also dart, and many, many other languages that can compile to JavaScript.&gt; npmYarn is the obvious one (although it still uses the npm repo). Or you could leave node altogether and use deno. There are probably other alternatives.&gt; Visual Studio Code(Neo)vim and emacs are both good options, although they have a steep learning curve. There&#x27;s sublime text if you don&#x27;t mind something proprietary. Probably others I&#x27;m less familiar with.

I like your list, though I would add Pagure[1] as an option for a GitHub alternative, simply because I like the &quot;open data&quot; principle also applied to project data. And extensibility is nice if you want to support custom workflows. :)[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pagure.io&#x2F;pagure" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pagure.io&#x2F;pagure</a>

&gt; Drone for CII&#x27;m a fan of Drone, might not have every feature ever, but I used it at my old job and it was glorious. It ran without issue, just silently sat there and diligently built things quickly without complaint. I didn&#x27;t realise how good it was until I had to use Azure DevOps.

The smaller you are, the greater the risk of adopting SaaS like GitHub IMO, so I&#x27;ve used a lot of the alternatives. I try to run everything I can behind the firewall:- Gitea for a light weight Git GUI. I don&#x27;t want pure GitHub SaaS and with GitLab you need to drink the Kool-Aid and marry your workflow to it. GitLab is also really stubborn about their business model and the pricing sucks once you get off the free version. Use the Enterprise Edition in unlicensed mode if you decide to try it.- Drone for CI. CI is my biggest concern in terms of vendor lock in and Drone has an extremely generous (free), no BS license for small developers. It can be self hosted and the plugin system looks pretty decent. IE: I don&#x27;t have to rely on them to add functionality I desperately want &#x2F; need. I don&#x27;t trust GitHub to never screw us with Actions and I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s possible to self host the server components of actions (for free). I don&#x27;t trust GitLab to never screw us with feature tiers where new development goes into higher tiers only.- Nexus for repositories and packages. This is harder than firing up some SaaS service, but it&#x27;s got pretty much anything you could ever want from a package store &#x2F; repository &#x2F; cache. It&#x27;s also been around for 10+ years and Sonatype has never tried to play any pricing games or engaged in underhanded attempts to leverage it in an effort to shift everyone to SaaS. Warranted or not, I trust them more than Microsoft and GitLab.- Traefik as a sidecar proxy doing SSL termination for the above services. Once it&#x27;s set up it just runs without any hassle.I&#x27;ve fallen off my fair share of bandwagons (hello Adobe Flex) and now whenever I choose technology to use, I always do a mental exercise where I consider the impact of having the vendor abandon me tomorrow. Don&#x27;t trust anyone when it comes to promised features or promises of fair dealing, reasonable prices, etc.. Disconnect the internet and whatever you&#x27;re left with are they only things you can truly rely on.You could keep using the current version of TypeScript even if Microsoft jumps the shark with it, so you might as well take advantage of it IMO. GitHub, Codespaces (VS Code), Actions, etc. are all going to work towards putting your development process onto Azure. Mark my words. It&#x27;ll happen and everyone will be paying per CPU cycle for things we used to insist on having control of.JetBrains makes good editors. They give you a perpetual license for old, outdated, versions of the apps if you drop your subscription which is BS. It should be the current version. Besides that though, they&#x27;re pretty decent. They have a nice, consistent release cadence and the personal license prices are really reasonable compared to the cost of SaaS. For example, I pay $150 USD &#x2F; year for everything they make compared to Codespaces (VSCode Online) having an estimated monthly price of $23.30 per month for 100 hours &#x2F; month of use (lol - maybe x2 that). Think about how it&#x27;s going to work out if you&#x27;re married to an online only workspace where your only options are to pay up or to lose the ability to work.Keep in mind though, the risk of being unproductive usually outweighs the risk of being price gouged and mistreated by SaaS vendors. If you&#x27;re creating $2k+ &#x2F; week of value, it makes a lot of sense to pay for everything. If you don&#x27;t, the person down the street will and they&#x27;ll probably out-compete you if they&#x27;re writing code while you&#x27;re being a sysadmin.

&gt; npm &#x2F; There aren&#x27;t any at this time, as far as I know.yarn?

&gt; GitHubPagure[1] is a good option here.&gt; TypeScriptYou could just use JavaScript?&gt; npmThere aren&#x27;t any at this time, as far as I know.&gt; Visual Studio Code (besides Atom)Sublime Text[2] is a favorite of many, though I use Emacs[3].[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pagure.io&#x2F;pagure" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pagure.io&#x2F;pagure</a>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sublimetext.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sublimetext.com&#x2F;</a>[3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;software&#x2F;emacs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;software&#x2F;emacs&#x2F;</a>

Thanks for the responses. I was half kidding. I depend heavily on all of these and need to double down on them! Some of the alternatives are at Facebook, which I also don&#x27;t trust, for different reasons. It&#x27;s hard to boycott FAAMG completely. I avoid getting hired by one of them or being locked into their proprietary technologies though. For instance I use GitHub heavily (just like I&#x27;d use YouTube if I made video content) but am not buying into all their extra features like GitHub Actions and GitHub Discussions.

I don&#x27;t want to support this company. What are good alternatives to GitHub, TypeScript, npm, and Visual Studio Code (besides Atom)?

I&#x27;m sorry to hear that. When I compared various package managers few months ago I liked AppGet most. What&#x27;s saddening is winget doesn&#x27;t even do half of what&#x27;s appget is capable of right now.

You’re putting words in the author’s mouth, because that doesn’t seem like the problem.The problem was “the slow and dreadful communication speed” and “the total radio silence at the end”, and:&gt; [T]he […] announcement. AppGet, which is objectively where most ideas for WinGet came from, was only mentioned as another package manager that just happened to exist; While other package managers that WinGet shares very little with were mentioned and explained much more deliberately.

The fact that you’re allowed to do something doesn’t mean you’re not a dick for doing so. Nor does it mean you can’t be called out for being a dick.

The only complaint I see is the lack of attribution, which is something that is pretty mandatory for open source projects. He&#x27;s very clear about the situation and that he didn&#x27;t expect more than he got except for attribution. Did you even read the article?

1. Release some code under a permissive license2. Start complaining when companies exercise precisely the rights you have given them

You could argue that these sort of corporate shenanigans are a case for continuing to maintain an independent trusted alternative package manager.

Lol i thought it was a 4chan joke:
Company [1] is not bad because every company do so.not just micro$oft
1 source: I work in the company

Can confirm.Heck, I’ve been given an interview day for a c-level position at a billion dollar company by the entire executive team and board only to never hear back from them again.

This exact thing happens all the time. And not just Microsoft.Usually you sign something that prohibits you from talking about the meetings, though.

Fuck anyone callous enough to take something as far as an onsite trip with the pretense of a job and then just ghost them. I can&#x27;t think of a much clearer way to show that much disrespect of someone and their time. And that&#x27;s just the tip of the iceberg in this case. Remember things like this whenever you see the &quot;microsoft &lt;3 linux&quot; slogan and the rest of the PR facade people are all too willing to swallow.

&quot;The Day Microsoft stole my work I done for free on AppGet&quot; would be a more accurate title...

From the article:&gt; Do you want to know how Microsoft WinGet works? go read the 
article I wrote 2 years ago about how AppGet works.

It’s mentioned in the article: “ the core mechanics, terminology, the manifest format and structure, even the package repository’s folder structure”The manifest format is particularly egregious.

Can you go into more detail about which features you believe were copied?

I&#x27;m not really interested in patents or regret not patenting anything. I just used patents to try to explain what was taken, and not attributed.

If you patented your idea, I think you would antagonize and scare away a lot of people from participating in the open source project.

From the article, it sounds like he did pursue. After some interviews Microsoft dropped contact.

Sounded like they wanted to hire you for their package manager and you chose not to pursue. You have every right to be mad I suppose but as you say in the article, and in that comment, you&#x27;re definitely aware of what happens to open source projects. On the other hand I&#x27;m mainly glad their adaptation was open source. I think they have to maintain their own version in order to ensure that they don&#x27;t wind up with some rogue applications on their package manager.I try to assume no bad intentions these days.

Can&#x27;t think of a more wasted effort then trying to compete with maintaining a package manager in your spare time than a clone from the OS vendor who can out resource, outspend, out market, out evangelize, out reach you, etc.It would a futile endeavour, a realization acknowledged by the author, any further dev cycles on it would be wasted &amp; are better spent elsewhere.

If the author&#x27;s intention was simply to make a good package manager system, why would he? There is one now that is supported by Microsoft.

At this point, why not keep it going? Your story is good enough reason to keep working and build a community and&#x2F;or foundation around AppGet.

Did you get azure credits after all? Looks like they &#x27;forgot&#x27; about this as well.

They didn’t even need to acquire - MIT license means they could just fork it and use it as they preferred, keeping his name in the About screen that nobody reads. But it would have looked bad.So they did this and... it looks even worse.

I can say I’m a bit upset on your behalf. Actually acquiring the code would have cost Microsoft very little money, would have ended up with a better product and also would have brought along the current user space in a very graceful manner.

Not only should they say you&#x27;re the inventor, but they should have paid you for it. They snowballed you. Microsoft doesn&#x27;t deserve you

It reminds me even more of Stac Electronics: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Stac_Electronics#Microsoft_lawsuit" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Stac_Electronics#Microsoft_law...</a>In 1990, they put out Stacker, which did transparent disk compression, effectively giving people twice as much disk space. It was a huge hit, so Microsoft called them up about an acquisition, entered discussion, and as part of the due dilligence process, even looked at the source code.In 1993, Microsoft released their own version of Stacker as part of the OS. No thank you, no money for Stac, just a giant middle finger. Stac sued and eventually won some money, but it was never the same.Everybody keeps telling me that Microsoft is different these days. About how they love open source now. And it&#x27;s true that after decades of erosion of their primary monopolies, they can&#x27;t get away with being as lazy and awful as they were in, say, the early IE era. But this suggests to me that deep down they haven&#x27;t really changed.

Sorry for your shitty experience. Really reminds me of Robert Kearns who&#x27;s windshield patent was stolen by big auto companies [0].Robert patented it but still megacorps tried to screw him over because they thought they could. He did win but only after an exhausting trial that took years.Really sucks when credit is not given where due.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Robert_Kearns" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Robert_Kearns</a>

&gt;&gt; “I haven&#x27;t updated the original article since I&#x27;m not sure what the etiquette for updating a highly shared article is.”Adding “UPDATE:(date)text” either in the footer - with a brief dip in the header saying there’s an updated in the footer is an easy way to accomplish this.

In all fairness:- &quot;NuGet&quot; is super-popular in .NET circles (included in Visual Studio by default)- &quot;apt-get&quot; is the classic tool for Windows Subsystem for LinuxSo &quot;WinGet&quot; certainly &quot;makes sense&quot; as a name without being a direct ripoff of AppGet

&gt; Calling it &quot;WinGet&quot; was the real punch in the gut.I feel for the guy, but someone who called their package manager &quot;app get&quot; in 2014 when &quot;apt get&quot; has existed for since 1998 is in no position to take umbrage at a competing package manager having a six-letter name ending in get.

I would think that their old system of stack ranking would have had that selection impact.  It has been gone for a long time but could it have had a lasting impact on company culture by who was being kept and who was promoted into positions that are responsible for the culture today?  I don&#x27;t think such a thought is unreasonable.

&gt;Does Microsoft select for assholes or something?Probably, but it&#x27;s not limited to Microsoft.Any company where revenues are the highest goal (and all publicly traded companies should be this way; it&#x27;s an obligation to share holders) will, generally speaking, select for assholes and sociopaths.How strong that selection is, how pervasive, and how quickly it happens are variables in the equation, but the effect is the same, and it sucks.

&gt;Calling it &quot;WinGet&quot; was the real punch in the gut.Should they name it &quot;wget&quot;?

Calling it &quot;WinGet&quot; was the real punch in the gut.Does Microsoft select for assholes or something? There&#x27;s a thousand other package manager names [1] in the wild and they chose that one.So much for &quot;developers, developers, developers&quot;...[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_software_package_management_systems" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_software_package_manag...</a>

&gt;Ah yes. The new Microsoft, same as the old Microsoft.I wouldn&#x27;t say that. It&#x27;s a big company thing.

Reducing this down to a Microsoft thing is a bit hasty. Apple has done it. IBM has done it. And, when I was working for a less well-known company, I once burned a whole lot of social capital trying to prevent it from happening.At least in that instance, there was never anything overtly malicious happening. It was just your garden variety &quot;banality of evil&quot; situation. The existing corporate decision-making structures - that is, the bureaucracy - had no real mechanism to make sure that things like this are handled in an ethical manner. It&#x27;s really hard to accomplish something that the bureaucracy isn&#x27;t designed to handle, because that means that it&#x27;s not really anybody&#x27;s job to keep that particular ball rolling. So all it takes is one person not really giving a damn (perhaps only because they don&#x27;t understand why they should) to scupper the whole thing.If that experience is similar to how these things happen at Microsoft and Apple and IBM, then the problem isn&#x27;t Microsoft, the problem is American workplace culture, and we have a responsibility to change how we work. Not in reaction to specific instances like this that have already happened, but in anticipation of, and in order to prevent, things like this from happening in the future.

Ah yes. The new Microsoft, same as the old Microsoft.I am really sorry this happened to you. On the scale of Microsoft, or even on the scale of what they&#x27;re putting into this effort, it would have cost approximately nothing to give you an &quot;acquisition&quot; you would have been happy with. If the job didn&#x27;t work out, they could have given you a fat consulting contract for a year or two. Or they just could have written you a check.And it would have cost them actual nothing to just treat you with respect. Say how much they loved your work. Credit you publicly as a leader and an inspiration. Arrange a smooth transition for your users.For what it&#x27;s worth, I&#x27;m glad for you that the job didn&#x27;t happen. Much better to be far away from people like this.

Yes, post-interview ghosting happens, and, I&#x27;m ashamed to admit, it happened to a few candidates that I was part of interviewing. But that doesn&#x27;t make it an acceptable practice — I feel that professionalism demands to let candidates know one way or the other as quickly as possible.

Under the circumstances, it wasn&#x27;t just a regular interview and so it was either rude (neglectful) not to get back to him or possibly (unlikely) there were other reasons... i.e. someone in the hierarchy had another plan.

A friend of mine sent a resume, didn&#x27;t hear anything and then got a job offer _4 months_ later. Generally I agree, not hearing anything means you didn&#x27;t pass, but fuck companies and the people that do that and I don&#x27;t ever want to work at one.

Yes sometimes it means that. But if the company is desirable, knows its desirable and knows the interview means a lot to the interviewee, then its the height of arrogance and cruelty to &#x27;ghost&#x27; them. Screw that &#x27;just business&#x27;, its not just business, its shitty behavior out of a company that has the resources to do the right thing.

Cmon, I live in a country where there is a legal obligation to inform candidates whether they passed the interview. It&#x27;s not a very high bar. We shouldn&#x27;t be accepting this kind of behaviour - especially from someone as renowned as Microsoft. It would have been absolutely trivial for them to send a polite three sentence email when they made their decision.I mean, not to shoot the messenger, you&#x27;re right, that&#x27;s exactly what it meant, but it isn&#x27;t acceptable behaviour.

&gt; this situation often means &quot;you didn&#x27;t pass the interview.&quot;To my mind, it also means the interviewers didn&#x27;t pass.A company that&#x27;s indifferent to the people it&#x27;s hiring is unlikely to be magically different once you&#x27;re in the door.

I flew to Seattle on December 5th to have a full day of interviews&#x2F;meetings at Microsoft HQ. I met with four different people; three of the meetings were more like your typical interviews; the meeting with Andrew was more about what we should do once this is all over and how we would migrate AppGet’s process and infrastructure to be able to handle Microsoft’s scale. We talked about some of our options, but in general, I thought everything went well.My last meeting ended at around 6 pm. I took an Uber to the airport and was back in Vancouver.And then, I didn’t hear anything back from anyone at Microsoft for six months.For what it&#x27;s worth – and I&#x27;m not really sure whether it&#x27;s helpful to say this, or whether it&#x27;s even true – this situation often means &quot;you didn&#x27;t pass the interview.&quot;The reason I mention it, is that it took an embarrassingly long time for me to understand this. Maybe it&#x27;s common knowledge. But an identical situation happened to me at Magic Leap. I hesitate to mention their name, lest it sound like I&#x27;m calling them out or something, but I&#x27;m not. And in general I no longer feel negatively towards companies that end up doing that, so I don&#x27;t think any particular stigma should be attached to Magic Leap for doing that.I&#x27;m trying (and possibly failing) to share a personal experience of &quot;I used to feel awful in situations like this; now I realize it&#x27;s just business, and the decision of pass&#x2F;fail has extraordinarily little to do with the skill of the programmer being interviewed, so don&#x27;t take it as a sign of anything.&quot;None of this is to undermine your overall point that it&#x27;s generally not cool to ghost a candidate (to put it mildly), and that it&#x27;s a doubly not-cool move to then clone the product of the candidate in question. But, it happens, and I just wanted to reassure you that yes, it does happen. It would&#x27;ve helped me to hear that at one point, so here it is, just in case.

That would only apply if they copied code as opposed to architecture&#x2F;concepts, no?

&gt;What upsets me is how no credit was givenApache license requires to preserve copyright notices, did you have any?

I&#x27;m sorry. This does feel like a pretty shitty situation. I hope all of this attention helps connect you with some people you go on to do great things with!

Hmm, it&#x27;s not like f.lux were the only ones doing it. If they were the first, then credit to them for the concept (and for the software, I&#x27;m not belittling it).This seems like genericisation in trademarks to me. Sometimes things grow to be useful more broadly -- that seems like something to celebrate.If you&#x27;re railing against capitalism in general however, then I&#x27;m with you! Distribution of wealth shouldn&#x27;t be left to a fight between a small cadre of corporation owners vs. the populous.

&gt; but by MicrosoftMicrosoft all but invented the practice at the 90&#x27;s.

Did Linus Torvalds &quot;Sherlock&quot; Bitkeeper by writing git? I also recall there wasn&#x27;t much sympathy for Paragon Software (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22706172" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22706172</a>) when exFAT support was added to the Linux kernel, obsoleting their product.This furor is a surprising flip-flop given the usual &quot;information wants to be free&quot; and &quot;patents for software are dumb&quot; cheerleading that we usually see around here.

I know it by a different name<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=JlwwVuSUUfc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=JlwwVuSUUfc</a>

It would appear that you have been &#x27;Sherlocked&#x27; (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.howtogeek.com&#x2F;297651&#x2F;what-does-it-mean-when-a-company-sherlocks-an-app&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.howtogeek.com&#x2F;297651&#x2F;what-does-it-mean-when-a-co...</a>) but by Microsoft.Looks like all the bigger companies are doing this now.

It is a sad day. But let my congratulate you.You and countless other made impossible. Created community Microsoft could not ignore. It had to adopt, it had to change. Scary beast really. It does not know how to work with, it knows how to ride.It took path you&#x27;ve paved. I see it - there is no dependency resolution, no make dependencies - as simple as possible so people can participate. More like Flatpack than apt.Microsoft does not like fragmentation. There would be a big pull of users. It&#x27;s interesting how they are going to fight mallware, spyware, ransomware. Issues like chrome Stylish and npm leftpad. With all respect it is not clear you could manage it, there is quite a list in the queue [0].Please don&#x27;t despair, you&#x27;ve made gift to community not Microsoft.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;appget&#x2F;appget.packages&#x2F;pulls" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;appget&#x2F;appget.packages&#x2F;pulls</a>

Did you link the wrong article? The one you linked basically says that (1) you are using yaml files to describe the package instead of scripts and (2) you have the ability to specify multiple installers per package to support multiple architectures.If that&#x27;s all the innovation that MSFT has supposedly &#x27;copied&#x27;...

&gt; and even not satisfying the basic MIT license termsThat&#x27;s what I don&#x27;t get about people who don&#x27;t think this is a big deal. That a license is open source does not mean it is without conditions.

As author of an open source tool that was already steatlh-forked twice without any contact whatsoever by VC-backed startups - including clearly copying text from my website&#x2F;FAQ - without giving any sort of credit on the idea&#x2F;implementation they used for 80% of their product but on the contrary claiming how revolutionary their products are and best idea since sliced bread, and even not satisfying the basic MIT license terms, I can completely understand your frustration.At least they were nice enough to pay you a trip to Seattle and (briefly) mentioned your project in the release announcement, I didn&#x27;t even get a &quot;thank you&quot;.As a result of this I re-licensed my code from MIT to OSL-3 and reduced my involvement in this project a lot so I focus on the things that actually matter in life: my wellbeing and spending the time with my family.

This is a common design. Only MS can tell you the truth.
Is there anything you&#x27;re talked offline made you feel they copied your idea?I think I will not credit everyone on my comparison tables. I only credit who inspired me hugely. MS hasn&#x27;t implemented everything AppGet had. I bet MS is waiting for public feedback for the next point. Acutally MS has its Roadmap:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;microsoft&#x2F;winget-cli&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;doc&#x2F;windows-package-manager-v1-roadmap.md#v10-scenarios" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;microsoft&#x2F;winget-cli&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;doc&#x2F;wind...</a>For the spec, only two common options: YAML &amp; JSON. And every YAML spec looks this way.MS has other experiences like TypeScript Definition also.
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;DefinitelyTyped&#x2F;DefinitelyTyped&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;types" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;DefinitelyTyped&#x2F;DefinitelyTyped&#x2F;tree&#x2F;mast...</a>

I agree with this outlook. However, I don&#x27;t know how I&#x27;d react if this were to happen to me. If I do something out of altruism and somebody takes it and makes money off it, I guess it leaves a bad taste? Other than that, I think this approach is done everyday by every developer, whether they take code from other softwares or from StackOverflow, very rarely do they credit or even give reference to where the code has been taken from.

Virtually all open source licenses require at least the inclusion of the original copyright notice in all derivative works. Now, if the code itself were altered in superficial ways, but the structure and mechanism were essentially the same, it is kind of a grey area.Regardless of the legal case, the idea that concerns of reputation or credit are irrelevant to open source work is a crock. People may be working on open source because they genuinely want to help others, but if you deny them credit for the work they did then you can very well expect the well of open source innovation to dry up pretty quickly. And for a company like Microsoft, reputation is exactly why they are contributing to open source in the first place.

Exactly that: you open-sourced it so it&#x27;s your donation to the world. Don&#x27;t be sour if someone copies your idea or makes a ton of money from it.And what would be the benefit if Microsoft gave you credit for it? Most likely their lawyers would reject it since you may then be able to sue them for...I don&#x27;t know what, but money in any case.It&#x27;s a very Microsoft-thing to do to copy someone else&#x27;s idea and improve on it (C#, RDP, Excel). If you release something as open-source you have to ask yourself if your doing it out of altruism or for money? In case of the latter you have to plan accordingly, by patenting or with restrictive licensing.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;appget&#x2F;appget&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;LICENSE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;appget&#x2F;appget&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;LICENSE</a>Apache 2.0 by the looks of things.Interesting question would be whether WinGet is a &quot;derivative work&quot; of AppGet.

What license did you release AppGet under? Almost every open source license at a very minimum requires that credit be given to the original authors. Arguably they are in a situation of legal liability (IANAL).You don&#x27;t strike me as the kind of person that would litigate such things, but I would like to think that if the right people at Microsoft became aware of such a liability, they might choose to give you credit (to be on the safe side).

As bad as this is it would be worse to intentionally use an known inferior method for the sake of being different. This can still be corrected by giving props to AppGet. Or you can&#x27;t blame companies for being companies? Hate the game.

Very sad history. But not something new.MS and many others don&#x27;t love OSS or contribute them back. Few really do it. But instead, they are leveraging software because OSS licenses allow it. One example, see GPL, they didn&#x27;t ever accept it. But they embrace any other software without restrictions on top of &quot;OSS&quot;, if not so, they just create its own &quot;permissive&quot; licenses (MSPL).Many of us are creating software even without expecting to get money back from users of any kind. Money back in many situations can be just a gentle retribution from community (E.g voluntary donations).So, No MS, you don&#x27;t really &quot;love&quot; OSS.

It seems. It looks like very few HN posters compares actual source code or even open GitHub (C# &#x2F; C++).

Several things don&#x27;t add up here.&gt; Code being copied isn&#x27;t an issue.I looked at both repos and they share no code at all.In his article, the author claims that &quot; If I were the patenting type, this would be the thing you would patent. ps. I don&#x27;t regret not patenting anything.&quot;That&#x27;s really not how patents work, and looking at the repo, a second year CS student could do the same really. I don&#x27;t see anything that could remotely be patented. It reads where to find the installer from a config file and determine what to do based on an enum.Throughout the article the author uses the term acqui-hire but it seems Microsoft was simply considering him for a PM position (and he failed the interview). There&#x27;s nothing to acquire since there&#x27;s no patent, no IP and no brand. Only a registered domain and what seems like an anemic userbase, if any.Being featured in The Verge[0] and on HN&#x27;s front page will probably bring a lot more eyeballs to the startups he&#x27;s trying to promote. So congratulation for the free advertising![0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;5&#x2F;28&#x2F;21272964&#x2F;microsoft-winget-windows-package-manager-appget-copied" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;5&#x2F;28&#x2F;21272964&#x2F;microsoft-winget...</a>

Author here,
Because it&#x27;s sure to come up here is a comment I wrote on Reddit that clarifies somethings, I haven&#x27;t updated the original article since I&#x27;m not sure what the etiquette for updating a highly shared article is.------Code being copied isn&#x27;t an issue. I knew full well what it meant to release something opensource and I don&#x27;t regret it one bit. What was copied with no credit is the foundation of the project. How it actually works. If I were the patenting type, this would be the thing you would patent. ps. I don&#x27;t regret not patenting anything.
And I don&#x27;t mean the general concept of package&#x2F;app managers, they have been done a hundred times. If you look at similar projects across OSes, Homebrew, Chocolaty, Scoop, ninite etc; you&#x27;ll see they all do it in their own way. However, WinGet works pretty much identical to the way AppGet works.
Do you want to know how Microsoft WinGet works? go read the article (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;keivan.io&#x2F;appget-what-chocolatey-wasnt&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;keivan.io&#x2F;appget-what-chocolatey-wasnt&#x2F;</a>) I wrote 2 years ago about how AppGet works.I&#x27;m not even upset they copied me. To me, that&#x27;s a validation of how sound my idea was. What upsets me is how no credit was given.

Just to be clear, I was very clear with them during our conversation that it would only happen if they committed to keeping the spirit of AppGet (which they did)I might be wrong, but I don&#x27;t think to have MS behind a project like that causing it exponentially grow was a betrail of users.

Not everyone is able or willing to develop large-scale open-source community&#x2F;project.. Also, mono is a much large and more significant project that runs on Linux, not a Windows app.

&gt; Did Microsoft ask Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza to bring Mono with them to kill&#x2F;rename it? No, that’s not what happened.Visual Studio for Mac is sort of a renamed version of MonoDevelop...

I’ve just switched from MP to HomeBrew. I’m interested in why do you think MP is superior?

Used it in the days it required everything to run as root (Sudo). Then discovered homebrew and have never looked back. Every package I&#x27;ve looked at is better maintained on brew. Why do you think MP is superior?

MacPorts still has a number of Apple engineers contributing to it, although it is no longer an Apple-sponsored project and I have no idea if they are doing so in any professional capacity.Homebrew, interestingly, has been moving towards an App Store-esque “binary distribution platform” for a while now.

MacPorts (né DarwinPorts) was created by Apple engineers long before the App Store existed. IMHO it’s superior to Homebrew in just about every way, existed long before Homebrew and targets the same audience (unlike the App Store which is targeting a very different population).If you haven’t looked at MP lately, it’s worth reviewing.

&gt;There are parts of Microsoft that understand open source. Most parts of the Windows team ain’t thatThe story goes that the new Microsoft understands open source at the top. 
A windows package manager is such an essential component of the operating system that it is visible at the top. Even more, Github, npm - package managers are at the core of their strategy.How big is the risk that the new Microsoft is just lip service and they won&#x27;t respect the GitHub and npm community either?

Disagree. Clearly you don’t work on OSS as your primary job and you don’t know enough teams&#x2F;people at MSFT.

Micorsoft loves OSS as much as they are able to profit off it. Did they spend $7.5B buying github for the love of ideals?And sure enough they understand OSS for what it is better than anyone else. Thank you, creative person, here is your exposure.

Nobody at Microsoft understands open source. The people who pretend to understand are just glorified sales people pretending to be developers promoting every new Microsoft product regardless how shit it is or how much better other competing products are (you know who these sales people are).Microsoft loves OSS as much as they are able to control it. They are like an abusive partner who &quot;love you&quot; for as long as they control every step of your life but as soon as you step aside they&#x27;ll grab a hammer and smash you in the face.

There are parts of Microsoft that understand open source. Most parts of the Windows team ain’t that (exceptions apply). Reading this saddens me a lot as he clearly got screwed. But this is why any project with momentum should consider growing its community and maybe forming a foundation.For example, Homebrew and its community&#x2F;infrastructure is better than and bigger than anything Apple could ever do (and we know how they run Mac App Store to begin with).When the author said “Microsoft would hire me, AppGet would come with me, and they would decide if they wanted to rename it something else” , I can immediately tell that’s not how you do OSS. That would be betraying to your users and maintainers.Did Microsoft ask Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza to bring Mono with them to kill&#x2F;rename it? No, that’s not what happened. And thats how significant open source projects&#x2F;communities should work; not controlled by a single person.

Microsoft is likely looking for a solution that would allow easy distribution of software in enterprise context without having to repackage it.Having a widely accepted and used package format would solve that. You could just pick the package for notepad++ and others and push them to workstations via Intune.

I&#x27;m convinced the sole purpose of some open source projects are to be good enough to prevent other open source projects from filling the void, but bad enough to keep from competing with vested commercial interests.This might just be one of those cases. Why would Microsoft want to invest in another distribution platform when they already have the Microsoft Store where they can do whatever they want?Sure, WinGet has an MIT license, but that doesn&#x27;t mean anything. The only important thing is who gets to commit to the manifest(s) on the master branch. That&#x27;s Microsoft. They own it. They control it. They curate it. They decide who gets to distribute via it.I&#x27;d bet money they&#x27;ll tie it in to Azure somehow at some point.

The really sad thing is that I still don&#x27;t think Microsoft has actually solved the package manager problem in any meaningful way. WinGet feels like just yet another subtly incompatible package standard.I would say Microsoft should buy Chocolatey but they would probably just ruin it. (Not to say this is a uniquely Microsoft problem; it&#x27;s reminiscent of the Pipenv&#x2F;Poetry&#x2F;virtualenv... mess in the Python community.)

(A)GPL doesn&#x27;t protect ideas. Patents do that.

Their lawyers will have a hard time justifying that none of the original source was used to create their new win-get project, given that the author of appget has met with the engineering team directly.So if it were GPL, microsoft would likely need to license their new winget project under GPL, which would be a win&#x2F;win for open source.

Well, as the law stands now, due to Google v Oracle, APIs are copyrighted. Hopefully the Supreme Court will fix that in the coming months (they’ve agreed to hear the case), but, as of now, that’s the law.

They didn’t copy the code, just the APIs and ideas.In another words, if ideas were copyrighted, GNU&#x2F;Linux wouldn’t exist.

This is why it&#x27;s important to license FOSS projects under the (A)GPL, rather than the MIT license. It makes it far less profitable for companies to steal your ideas&#x2F;code, and ensures that anything based on your work will put users first.

Realistically, though, a year from now nobody will care. I mean, I started in this industry in the &quot;MS is outright evil&quot; era. How many people did they screw over? If I remember correctly, there was even a guy who was owed a pile of stock&#x2F;stock options and when he got cancer they suddenly went missing (no need to pay the dead guy!). Day by day, year by year, these misdeeds are seen as irrelevant. MS is a different company these days (almost literally). Should we hold them accountable for their past sins forever? (I have a friend who still refuses to buy products from Nestle given their ancient &quot;poison in baby formula is OK as long as it saves us money&quot; stance. That&#x27;s older than I am!)In reality, these kinds of antics just don&#x27;t hurt companies significantly -- even ridiculously horrible things that are arguably crimes against humanity (have I invoked Godwin&#x27;s law?) In comparison to some of the incredibly awful things companies do (and get away with), this is minor to the point of not even being a footnote in the annals of evil (note to self: don&#x27;t google that term to check the spelling...).However, there will be a few of us who will be reminded of why we don&#x27;t do business with MS (and hence will have no need of WinGet). It won&#x27;t make any difference, but it will be there.

Yes. Microsoft really dropped the ball on this one.So much of what Microsoft has been doing — GitHub, .NET Core, NPM, Visual Studio Code, Windows Subsystem for Linux, etc. — has been to build goodwill with “developers! developers! developers!” Taking the resources to do an acquihire (or hire + bonus) right is small relative to the PR hit.

&gt; some higher ups decided no, they don&#x27;t need to hire youTotal misjudgment on their part. Thanks to this one HN post they already lost in terms of developer good will way more than his potential salary would be.Every time anyone who uses WinGet, who read this, will think &#x27;oh, yeah, that&#x27;s the tool that Microsoft build their version of behind original author&#x27;s back, while stringing him and ghosting for few months&quot;.

I totally agree.It&#x27;s a totally different world inside a huge company like Microsoft, though. It&#x27;s massive and its own little world. After working inside for a few years, you start thinking that it&#x27;s &quot;normal&quot;. You see projects start up and get shut down, you see people trying to get into the company, you see people trying to transfer to other teams within the company, you see people trying to leave the company, you see people in the same team for a decade or more, etc. Because of the scale of things, you sort of become numb to a lot of things you see, so I sort of &quot;understand&quot; if somebody just figured recruiting would sort out that someone wasn&#x27;t the right &quot;fit&quot; for the company.I don&#x27;t think this kind of behavior is necessarily the right one, but it&#x27;s the outcome of a large behemoth made up tens of thousands of people.

It&#x27;s a bit lame to say recruiting must have dropped the ball. If you&#x27;ve engaged with someone, you&#x27;re inspired by their technology, etc., etc. then handing them over to recruiting for a rejection is pretty weak.

I can see that happening at Microsoft for sure. There&#x27;s no doubt legal would&#x27;ve been involved with the conversations and gave heads up to all people on the interview loop.

No experience at Microsoft but plenty with lawyers in large corps and I would rate another possibility highly, which is that the team wanted to contact him but lawyers recommended &quot;no further contact&quot; as the safest legal IP path. Essentially, they were trying to close the barn door on clean-rooming the software and any further conversation could leak non-open-source ip that would then bring about a liability later on.

This is probably what happened. As a hiring manager i want to tell the candidates whenever we reject them but sometimes recruiting drops the ball and never reaches out with rejection email or call (our team usually calls them).This happened to one of my referrals so i know this firsthand.

This was definitely not a great experience, but my hunch is what happened is some higher ups decided no, they don&#x27;t need to hire you, the original team tells recruiting to notify you, recruiting drops the ball somehow, team goes on with their lives believing that you were told they were no longer interested, and everyone (except you, since you never got notified) believed the whole thing was resolved.The original people (not recruiters) who reached out to you should&#x27;ve connected after the decision was made. They probably figured the recruiters would do their dirty work, so no need to engage.Full disclosure: I worked at Microsoft for over a decade, so I know how slow and lumbering it can be. I bet some emails were missed and people didn&#x27;t follow up because &quot;they had a lot of other things they were tracking&quot;.

Is appget dead yet? Is the windows solution that much better?

Let us suppose a world where there are 17 computer programs we need.apt-get is one of them.Great program! It has done the job we&#x27;ve needed for decades!Millions of people are happy. Is there an ethical reason that should change?

Microsoft is the king of fake interviews. Absolute snakes. Netflix too. Funny how when you don&#x27;t work for a competitor no one wants to talk to you, then you work for a competitor or are a competitor and the VP&#x27;s want to interview you.Look, people, don&#x27;t waste anyone&#x27;s time unless you are going to HIRE someone. If you have a product that a big tech company is interested in, acquisition is the only path you should be considering and you should get help. Wasn&#x27;t there an article by a hacker news founder which basically said: don&#x27;t talk to big companies until you are ready to sell, even then get help.

I honestly really like how HomeBrew doesn&#x27;t require &quot;sudo&quot; for anything. Random stuff I download from internet should not require system permissions to do anything they want. That part of HB design is what sells it for me.

Homebrew is recapitulating all of the work that previous package managers have done, while making choices like analytics and stomping on &#x2F;usr&#x2F;local by default that others wouldn&#x27;t consider. I think there&#x27;s still a place for MacPorts.

In comparison, Apple hosted MacPorts, an early OS X package manager, and started to be involved in it directly.(nowadays MacPorts is not really necessary with Homebrew around, but that’s another thing)

Absolutely they keep whatever they took under the license they took it. Obviously.And they better have that well documented. Legal might have something to say about it, for example.It gives then a headache and it tells them you don&#x27;t like what they did.

You can totally rewrite your entire git history to make the entire repository GPL.You have no obligation to continue hosting the MIT version, and you can release a new version of every commit under GPL.

You cannot retroactively relicense code - only new code. Microsoft can just take the last version that&#x27;s not GPL.This is why if i were making an open source project, it will start off with GPLv3, with a commercial paid license if anyone wants to avoid the terms of the GPL. That gives the best of both worlds - open access to anyone, and if they want to modify, they must also be willing to contribute in some way.

Yep, this is why GPL exist. &quot;But corporations hate GPL&quot; as I can hear there often, well tough luck… GPL is about the rights of the users, not corporations. Another exemple of why open source projects should adopt GPL or AGPL, nothing less.

Re-licensee all your appget code as GPL v3. Everything about it. It might put the wind up them a little. They hate GPL.Good example of the strength of the GPL for projects you want to be open and don&#x27;t want mega-corp to embrace and close.BSD, MIT etc if you&#x27;re fine with that being done for the project.There are other dimensions for licensing, this is just one consideration of many in your decision.

Isn&#x27;t this completely usual corporate behavior? Even if the little guys building stuff make attempts to do the right thing, like contact and include people from outside who made the thing they are building upon, then at some level, at some stage, the arrangement gets stalled into oblivion to the point that the thing is already done and nothing can be handled gracefully anymore.

op, was done dirty. classic move, even SV had an episode on this kinda business. feign, an acquire-hire. and pick the team&#x27;s brains out. then launch competing product. I think PG had another essay on this too, never talk to business dev folks

If WinGet contains AppGet code and they didn&#x27;t credit him then yes, absolutely, moral rights in copyright (attribution, right of association, integrity) cannot be transferred during the lifetime of the owner and yes MSFT can be sued for breaching them. It is extremely likely the penalties meted out by a judge wouldn&#x27;t cover the costs of a lawyer. Not that anything like this would ever see a courtroom, MS will offer a settlement which in this case will be on the magnitude they gave to Mike Rowe for MikeRoweSoft.com (which was an xbox and some travel vouchers and such).If they stole his unpatented ideas then there&#x27;s nothing.

I am interested (and kind of depressed) to think - is there actually a legally defensible upper hand that exists here?

This is interesting perspective. Do you think this have the potential to negatively affect responsible parties on MSFT side given the negative PR generated?

I find MS seems quite immune to terrible publicity in the recent years. &quot;But it&#x27;s not the same company as before! They are doing open-source now!&quot; yada yada

I worked for a brand &amp; marketing company for 15 years and I observed that most of my clients had pretty short memories when it came to how they felt about me. If the last few milestones were really great they quickly forgot an incident. Obviously, the more impactful an incident, the longer&#x2F;more positive milestones had to be. An incident too impactful got your fired - but, in general, this was my experience.Even in their recent history Microsoft has repeated incidents, but also has some very big positive milestones. Also, keeping in mind, some customers will only see the positive milestones.

Hopefully they also weigh in the fact that screwing developers over is terrible publicity. Assume 100k developers see this and are slightly less inclined to trust MS in future, this bad publicity could easily cost them 1mn USD plus. A good will gesture of 100k USD at the start for consulting could have saved everyone a lot of trouble.See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23332123" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23332123</a> elsewhere in this thread for an example of the consequences.The cost of GitHub to MS was around 250 usd per user. If 4000 users leave that’s already a million USD.

Keivan obviously got screwed.Having worked at Microsoft, and seeing the nature of the bureaucracy, the only advice I would give for next time is...Just realize you can&#x27;t set terms with a large company like MSFT unless you get lawyers involved early.Stealing from you outright is simply too tempting, given their resources.I noticed there were some conditions Keivan tried to set regarding the future evolution of the technology before joining MSFT.In a large company like MSFT, there were bound to be large internal email threads relaying a play-by-play of negotiations with Keivan to: inside legal counsel, developers who already gave t-shirt sizes for building the tech in-house, product managers, and dozens of others.No matter what they tell you, they&#x27;re internally weighing- Should we just rip him off?
- Should we hire him? Would that be better or worse for liability?
- How IP protected is this? How much can we &quot;borrow&quot;?
- Is it worth the hassle of dealing with an aqui-hire we can&#x27;t control? Would that expose us to even more IP risk, or less?Once companies reach this size, they simply can&#x27;t be trusted to handle a negotiation transparently and in good faith, unless you have well paid lawyers fighting for you, or well established IP protection.I guess what I&#x27;m saying is...When dealing with any large tech company with near infinite resources -- like MSFT, GOOG, etc --, find a legally defensible upper hand, and assume they are weighing the cost-benefit of screwing you.(Sadly, this is exactly why lawyers make so much money.)

This is the Embrace, extend, and extinguish policy of Microsoft. I just hate how these corporates deal with talent. To them it is nothing more than a profit to make.

The Day AppGet Died