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.)
> 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:
> 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
> I didn’t create AppGet to get rich or to become famous or get hired by Microsoft.