For example, Homebrew and its community/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/rename it? No, that’s not what happened. And thats how significant open source projects/communities should work; not controlled by a single person.
The 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't respect the GitHub and npm community either?