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't the GPL solve that problem?
Sure, big companies can still use GPL'd code, but they're forced to give back as much as they take, which is exactly the outcome you want.
(This doesn't necessarily apply to the situation with AppGet, however.)
Of course either way they are a business and will be careful. Their core business will not be contributed.
This is just not cricket from team Microsoft.
I don't tell the story in any details since I don't want those details getting back to the real me and having a negative impact on my career for whatever reason.
All of the Windows apps that MS did this to back in the 1990s were closed source. Didn't help. MS has more than enough horsepower to just reverse engineer whatever they can't get the source code for if they care enough about the features.
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
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.
Perhaps a variant of CC-BY NC would be better, but it is not tailored to code.
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'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'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.
They didn't take any of the AppGet code, just the ideas.
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.)
It seems toothless to me. A relic from a byegone era when companies cared about ethical behavior.
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.
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's an especially crummy thing to do.
Github I guess?
> TypeScript, npm,
I don't know if you'll be able to avoid NPM, but _maybe_ you could try ReasonML if you're doing frontend stuff with TS? Don't really know tbh
> Visual Studio Code (besides Atom)?
Sublime Text 3 with plugins for general stuff, one of the JetBrains IDE's for more language specific work if so desired.
> 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.
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's no entitlement to ideas or claims anything was stolen.
2. Start complaining when companies exercise precisely the rights you have given them
I don’t understand this idea that a license that the author willingly released his code under is unenforceable, but EULAs are?
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20141007073104/http://gpl-violat...
The problem was “the slow and dreadful communication speed” and “the total radio silence at the end”, and:
> [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.
> Jeff picked me up at the airport, and we drove to Microsoft's main building where we were joined by Neil Konzen, a talented 23 year old who was Microsoft'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... "Microsoft's main systems programmer on the Macintosh" 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.
Also Applesoft basic was derived from Microsoft basic?
Yes, they did copy the operating system but that doesn't mean that the Mac Platform is unimportant to them.
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'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'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.
Plenty of other corporations, of varying sizes, want to steal ideas.
Comments on the internet can be interpreted in a myriad ways.
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'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/or PyTorch in place of partial ports available now.
This does not mean he did not ask during that time.
It's really an angering experience imo. I mean, I get it from a litigious mindset, but still not very humane.
I wish they'd just create something closer to tomato than the flashy, less useful interfaces.
Even if you don't, you submit applications through a recruiting site, and it tells you the current status of your application. It'll tell you if the application was rejected.
Gitlab, many other lesser known alternatives (such as the aforementioned sourcehut, although that has a different paradigm than github)
> Typescript
Facebook's flow is probably the closest. There's also dart, and many, many other languages that can compile to JavaScript.
> npm
Yarn 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.
> Visual Studio Code
(Neo)vim and emacs are both good options, although they have a steep learning curve. There's sublime text if you don't mind something proprietary. Probably others I'm less familiar with.
Plus a thing called "Structural typing" that gives you the flexibility of dynamic typing without losing the guarantees from static typing.
Even if that was the case, I have no regrets.
AGPL addresses that by putting code distributed as a web application in the same category as compiled code.
------
Code being copied isn't an issue. I knew full well what it meant to release something opensource and I don'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't regret not patenting anything. And I don't mean the general concept of package/app managers, they have been done a hundred times. If you look at similar projects across OSes, Homebrew, Chocolaty, Scoop, ninite etc; you'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 (https://keivan.io/appget-what-chocolatey-wasnt/) I wrote 2 years ago about how AppGet works.
I'm not even upset they copied me. To me, that's a validation of how sound my idea was. What upsets me is how no credit was given.
This kind of behavior stifles innovation and attempts to limit what people can do.
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'm not a lawyer but I'm pretty sure that hiring someone doesn'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.
Unless you use some framework that also works with native widgets or similar components, you're not getting much advantage.
> 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.
Let's be honest, if it's a concern they speak up and say shelving this is a condition of employment.
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.
I would say Microsoft should buy Chocolatey but they would probably just ruin it. (Not to say this is a uniquely Microsoft problem; it's reminiscent of the Pipenv/Poetry/virtualenv... mess in the Python community.)
> Do you want to know how Microsoft WinGet works? go read the article I wrote 2 years ago about how AppGet works.
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/CopyFair_License
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Copyfarleft
https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/copyfarleft-and-...
I might be wrong, but I don't think to have MS behind a project like that causing it exponentially grow was a betrail of users.
I try to assume no bad intentions these days.
>Meanwhile, much murmuring has been going on in recent months to the supposed effect that the absence of judicial enforcement, in US or other courts, somehow demonstrates that there is something wrong with the GPL, that its unusual policy goal is implemented in a technically indefensible way, or that the Free Software Foundation, which authors the license, is afraid of testing it in court.
(implying it has never been tested in any court)
>We do not find ourselves taking the GPL to court because no one has yet been willing to risk contesting it with us there.
(Explicitly stating it has never been tested in court)
>I have assisted free software developers other than the FSF to deal with such problems, which we have resolved—since the criminal infringer would not voluntarily desist and, in the cases I have in mind, legal technicalities prevented actual criminal prosecution of the violators—by talking to redistributors and potential customers.
And lastly, the money quote. In the cases of criminal, malicious infringement, they were not able to prosecute.
The original people (not recruiters) who reached out to you should'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't follow up because "they had a lot of other things they were tracking".
So yeah, their post interview stage communication seems to be the weakest part of a process I am sure I was one of hundreds going through at that time.
It would a futile endeavour, a realization acknowledged by the author, any further dev cycles on it would be wasted & are better spent elsewhere.
Sure, but not because of failure to reverse engineer someone else's product.
apt-get is one of them.
Great program! It has done the job we've needed for decades!
Millions of people are happy. Is there an ethical reason that should change?
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't mean anything. The only important thing is who gets to commit to the manifest(s) on the master branch. That's Microsoft. They own it. They control it. They curate it. They decide who gets to distribute via it.
I'd bet money they'll tie it in to Azure somehow at some point.
Back then, Flight Simulator was still owned by subLOGIC. Microsoft got a license from them to make the IBM PC version.
In another words, if ideas were copyrighted, GNU/Linux wouldn’t exist.
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.
Look, people, don't waste anyone'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't there an article by a hacker news founder which basically said: don't talk to big companies until you are ready to sell, even then get help.
(nowadays MacPorts is not really necessary with Homebrew around, but that’s another thing)
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.
The manifest format is particularly egregious.
Usually you sign something that prohibits you from talking about the meetings, though.
Good example of the strength of the GPL for projects you want to be open and don't want mega-corp to embrace and close.
BSD, MIT etc if you'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.
I was about to hire a guy and discussing him with the president, it came up that he was into ASICs for crypto mining (years before it was a big thing)... president didn’t like it, figured the guy to be a get rich quick type and through his direction we passed over hiring him.
Turns out in this case, it was a good call, but right or wrong it was enough to push the guy back in the pool as he was already on the edge anyhow.
And the icing on the cake is the "btw, we are giving you the exclusive so keep it secret".
Like, wtf. He ain't TechCrunch. Why the fuck are they giving him that exclusive? Nothing yells "we stole your stuff, but dude it was open source so you really can't complain, and thanks for the idea" more than that.
You can't make up this shit.
Total 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 'oh, yeah, that's the tool that Microsoft build their version of behind original author's back, while stringing him and ghosting for few months".
> I'm sure there was a reason they decided to not hire me. Maybe I had a shitty attitude? I don't know. I'm not questioning that. But I think an email letting me know and some credit would be fair to expect.
It's a totally different world inside a huge company like Microsoft, though. It's massive and its own little world. After working inside for a few years, you start thinking that it's "normal". 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 "understand" if somebody just figured recruiting would sort out that someone wasn't the right "fit" for the company.
I don't think this kind of behavior is necessarily the right one, but it's the outcome of a large behemoth made up tens of thousands of people.
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.
I can understand the justifications for culture fit, however, to me it sounds like you passed over someone because he was ambitious outside of work. That's fine if that's your culture, but you should consider that as a red flag.
Visual Studio for Mac is sort of a renamed version of MonoDevelop...
So if it were GPL, microsoft would likely need to license their new winget project under GPL, which would be a win/win for open source.
GCC is written specifically to prevent this sort of firewalling of the compiler to prevent it from being plugged into another piece of software and avoid GPL requirements.
oh i didnt know he was adamant against the clause - i thought that he didn't want to force it upon the many existing users of linux.
Wait, what? So if someone is a "name brand" celebrity, they should get to jump the queue and coast by with an "informal chat?" How is that fair? I don't care if I'm interviewing John Carmack, he's getting the same evaluation process I would give to any other senior candidate. Software Engineering's got enough problems with interviewing--it doesn't need an aristocracy that gets special treatment.
Not clear if they were trolling or just tone deaf.
He also has refused to release any of his projects under GPLv3 (or even “v2 or later”).
It doesn't download pirated shows, nor does it play them. It just organizes and renames and creates lists of missing episodes for files that may or may not be pirated content.
For anyone who doesn't get this reference:
In the end, it just makes more sense to pull in the actual Linux kernel than to try and achieve the same performance semantics.
- Gitea for a light weight Git GUI. I don'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't have to rely on them to add functionality I desperately want / need. I don't trust GitHub to never screw us with Actions and I don't think it's possible to self host the server components of actions (for free). I don'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's got pretty much anything you could ever want from a package store / repository / cache. It'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's set up it just runs without any hassle.
I'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't trust anyone when it comes to promised features or promises of fair dealing, reasonable prices, etc.. Disconnect the internet and whatever you'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'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'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 / year for everything they make compared to Codespaces (VSCode Online) having an estimated monthly price of $23.30 per month for 100 hours / month of use (lol - maybe x2 that). Think about how it's going to work out if you'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're creating $2k+ / week of value, it makes a lot of sense to pay for everything. If you don't, the person down the street will and they'll probably out-compete you if they're writing code while you're being a sysadmin.
Pagure[1] is a good option here.
> TypeScript
You could just use JavaScript?
> npm
There aren't any at this time, as far as I know.
> Visual Studio Code (besides Atom)
Sublime Text[2] is a favorite of many, though I use Emacs[3].
Last year a huge game company released something built on my tiny open-source game engine (uncredited), and I only found out about it later from a kind internet stranger. All things considered, better to know in advance so you can at least have your own response ready, so you can comment in the relevant HN/reddit threads, etc.
That said, the "keep it secret" part of the mail here does sound weird, but given the other history there may have been an NDA in place.
If you haven’t looked at MP lately, it’s worth reviewing.
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't like what they did.
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.
And also like I said, it worked out in this case, the guy was a get-rich-quick type. He went to work for someone I know and didn’t last there. Sub par work, rushed and didn’t really care. That’s all besides the point.
The point that yes, your outside interests can possibly effect your hiring prospects.
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'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'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 "borrow"? - Is it worth the hassle of dealing with an aqui-hire we can't control? Would that expose us to even more IP risk, or less?
Once companies reach this size, they simply can'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'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.)
> Do you want to know how Microsoft WinGet works? go read the article (https://keivan.io/appget-what-chocolatey-wasnt/)
But that alone doesn't particularly strike me as a completely novel approach on its own. Looking at package definitions for firefox across various package managers, you can notice that they all look somewhat similar to some degree. Though one could argue that appget and winget looks more similar than others, I'm not sure this is wholesale copying without digging into more details. But again, I'm not trying to argue that it's not, and I also agree the OP should've received more credit.
appget: https://github.com/appget/appget.packages/blob/master/manife...
winget: https://github.com/microsoft/winget-pkgs/blob/master/manifes...
scoop: https://github.com/lukesampson/scoop-extras/blob/master/buck...
homebrew cask: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-cask/blob/master/Casks/...
That being said, the fake interview process explained in the article is totally unacceptable and deserves some explanations from MS.
And what do you think "not able to prosecute" means? District attorneys (or non-USA equivalents) decide when to prosecute crimes, not private copyright owners. It's very rare for the criminal justice system to intervene in complicated white-collar stuff, especially when a straightforward civil remedy is available. A legal realist might say that means the GPL--and indeed most copyrights beyond those infringed by warez/torrentz sites--is effectively unenforceable criminally, and would in a useful sense be right; but it's enforceable civilly, so no one cares much.
In the past, I've been in talks with an employer about a job, and my enthousiasm was only so-so, and that tended to put a brake on the proceedings.
I've also seen it in the weebs and also brainwashing Japanese Corp culture.
I have a feeling because its m$ their cture dictates that they at least appear they were disgusted with his sonarr authorship.
When you use it, you get a nice Korn shell and it is built on PE binaries linked against PSDLL.DLL. there's a functioning but very old version of GCC that ships with it.
The PE binaries mark up the desired subsystem to be invoked so you don't have to be in the environment to execute one - the kernel takes over.
PSDLL acts as a translation layer for NT much as kernel32 does for win32. You can't run unmodified Linux binaries like you can with wsl. On the other hand, WSL requires that you invoke lxss with some special com magic to get access to Linux first so you can't just exec an elf file directly. The Pico processes you mentioned - these allow the kernel to install specific handlers/translators of their syscall functionality into the windows kernel.
So yeah architecturally they're pretty different and WSL isn't really the same subsystem concept they started with. On the other hand it that's probably a good thing because everything needed a rebuild for SUA.
I'm proud of the work I've done on Sonarr. If someone doesn't want to associate with me because of it, then the feeling is probably mutual.
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.
Even then there's always the analogue/human loophole I suppose, similar to captcha mechanical turks.
Due to this lots of Linux stuff is based around huge masses of tiny files (build processes, VCS, docker, etc) and there was just no chance the windows kernel was ever going to come remotely close performance wise.
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.
I know it wasn't the exact same playbook being used, but I think from the author's perspective, it very much feels like it.
> I didn’t even have to explain to her how the core mechanics, terminology, the manifest format and structure, even the package repository’s folder structure, are very inspired by AppGet.
I read “inspired” as “blatantly copied”. Not shocked at this from Microsoft. But not giving due credit is just a rip off. Seems like Andrew and whoever else corresponded with you were arm twisted by jerks (or had more jerks in their teams).
If anyone in the Winget team is reading this, your organization sucks. It seems to be showing signs of Microsoft from the ‘90s.
I'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't realise how good it was until I had to use Azure DevOps.
In reality, these kinds of antics just don't hurt companies significantly -- even ridiculously horrible things that are arguably crimes against humanity (have I invoked Godwin'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't google that term to check the spelling...).
However, there will be a few of us who will be reminded of why we don't do business with MS (and hence will have no need of WinGet). It won't make any difference, but it will be there.
"Microsoft is paying someone who develops piracy software"
The half assed articles from TechCrunch and such will cause a lot of drama around MS they simply don't want.
I like how this general direction is discussed a lot in France, and sad about learning a language taking so much effort.
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?
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.
It's literally the new cuddly microsoft Embracing, Extending and Extinguishing this guy's work.
And when I first heard about WinGet I though, "Yay! They continue to catch up to the place where developers are! Good for them!", but then this surfaced.
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.
If they stole his unpatented ideas then there's nothing.
If they had, surely they'd have learned from the backlash.
Does Microsoft select for assholes or something? There's a thousand other package manager names [1] in the wild and they chose that one.
So much for "developers, developers, developers"...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_package_manag...
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'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.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23332123 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.
What a pitiful world we live in.
- "NuGet" is super-popular in .NET circles (included in Visual Studio by default)
- "apt-get" is the classic tool for Windows Subsystem for Linux
So "WinGet" certainly "makes sense" as a name without being a direct ripoff of AppGet
That said, in my case the summary makes it sound better than it actually was. The game they released was a one-off promo thing, which made a big splash for a few days but was effectively dead by the time I heard about it a week or two later. Then there followed a dialog with a separate team inside Microsoft, about hopefully updating it, which dragged on for a while and basically resulted in their bit getting updated but not mine, etc. etc. Altogether it was a big distraction and a pretty dreary episode.
I realize I'm missing some context here, but I can't see how your life would work out better from _not_ receiving a heads up that the process has ended.
I suspect a week from now, 99% of people who read this will have forgotten about it.
Microsoft loves OSS as much as they are able to control it. They are like an abusive partner who "love you" for as long as they control every step of your life but as soon as you step aside they'll grab a hammer and smash you in the face.
So they did this and... it looks even worse.
Totally reasonable to still boycott them, makes more sense than getting annoyed at Microsoft in a situation like this (which is also deserved but more minor in the grand scheme of things).
If the JS package manager scene has taught me anything, it's that so long as one another's manifests/registries are readable, developers will happily try multiple programs which actually do the managing, and, to some degree, a little competition is what actually makes things gradually improve. I, at least, hadn't heard of appget prior to today. (Just chocolatey and oneget, both of which I'd used, both of which are likewise "invalidated" by winget, but persist regardless.) But I can only reasonably consider it if its primary maintainer reconsiders its "dead" status.
Your job is to create an App Manager.
There is already a code base under a MIT license.
You use it.
I'm not seeing the issue.
Edit: corrected autocorrect
The meat of this blog post, to me, seems like the terrible hiring pipeline with no feedback. That seems like a really bad experience. I can only imagine that someone really dropped a ball somewhere.
APT is the classic tool for debian-like Linux distributions. FTFY
I am guessing that the average "higher up" at Microsoft does not know what AppGet is, or even what the priorities for package management in Windows are. It's just not a high level strategy thing, it's a low level engineering thing.
Maybe being contacted by a product manager or engineer should make you cautious.
Homebrew, interestingly, has been moving towards an App Store-esque “binary distribution platform” for a while now.
Looks like the only viable remaining ecosystem is a linux laptop...
The issue is when they didn't just fork the codebase, they repeatedly flew the person who wrote the code out to Seattle on false pretenses, implying a job offer and additional money for their work, then picked the developer's brains until Microsoft learned all they needed from him, then just ignored all communication from him.
The issue is that it was dishonest and scummy behavior.
And you keep the copyright notice, otherwise you're violating the license.
If it's based on the same design (i.e. same file formats, mechanisms, etc.) then the issue is still not giving credit and pointing out the design it's based on. Doesn't cost them a thing and gives a lot of goodwill from people.
Like, if someone uses my code, I'm happy, if they copy the idea and present it as their own that's dishonest.
You just milk him for information and let him go without any further communication.
It may be perfectly legal to come out with their own version of AppGet, to base it on AppGet, and give it a name that is very close to AppGet, and if the developer wasn't a fit for Microsoft then they don't have to hire him.
But behaving in this way is like biting the hand that feeds you in terms of open source they come out sounding like a*oles.
When it was clear they didn't want to do an acqui-hire one solution would be to indicate that it was possibly they were going to create their own version of the product and perhaps 'purchase' the AppGet design/concept, or pay a consultancy fee for the time the developer was being interviewed - even for a token sum.
FWIW, I agree with you that WinGet is an entirely logical choice, catchy, and ultimately unrelated to AppGet. Yeah, it may seem like the choice was made intentionally / in spite of AppGet, but anyone who knows a bit about big company dynamics will tell you that the explanation for situations like this is usually mundane, innocent, and often dysfunctional — much like a toddler. A toddler that happens to have a billion dollars and can reshape the world with its decisions, but still similar. “The name is catchy and I like it” is akin to “I see red ice cream and I want it,” and it’s probably nothing deeper than that.
It was rather unfortunate to use apt-get as an example and then say it was for Windows, though. :)
Hello darkness, my old friend…
What scenario do you have in mind that would make Microsoft look in a positive way in this incident?
It reminds me of the way secure boot was rolled out where Microsoft said that this was all about "trust" and yet OEMs who are always keen to keep Microsoft sweet would strangely only bundle windows keys.
For example, make a great app for any platform and they will most likely incorporate the exact concept since it's successful.
This is why you should focus on the web, publishing on your own and then they can't simply steamroll you in the same way since the platform is open.
What sort of self-absorbed narciccist are you?
Context matters. That's the key point here.
Plus your two examples out of a hundred or so examples doesn't make it common either (or maybe one in a half examples since apt/apt-get/apt-cache are the three Debian programs under APT umbrella).
[1] there was no way this project was going to continue despite their nonsense about "broadening the options in the community", they knew what they were doing
If more stories like this one come out I'm sure the goodwill turns fast.
As opposed to the other tech bloggers who will have a scramble to write it after hearing about it with the rest of the world
Edit: Imo not a bad thing, it's just how it is. A lot of people will learn (of) Linux through WSL. Linux as a runtime.
And lets not forget - they had similar open source project and community. They decided not to participate but create their own. This new project will overshadow existing and eventually kill community.
I am really sorry this happened to you. On the scale of Microsoft, or even on the scale of what they're putting into this effort, it would have cost approximately nothing to give you an "acquisition" you would have been happy with. If the job didn'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's worth, I'm glad for you that the job didn't happen. Much better to be far away from people like this.
that part looked wrong
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's true that after decades of erosion of their primary monopolies, they can'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't really changed.
I feel for the guy, but someone who called their package manager "app get" in 2014 when "apt get" 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.
They were infamous for getting small companies in under NDA, then grabbing their tech, and dumping the small companies (often putting them out of business). They are not alone in this (Apple has done the same thing. I think they even have a term for it -"to Watson" * ). It's just that MS was the most egregious.
It makes me sad to see they are still doing it. I've been fairly impressed by what Nadella has done.
* EDIT: As adamdavidson pointed out, the term that everyone uses is "Sherlocked."
1. Please stop picking on Microsoft, it is unfair
2. Microsoft has changed, look at ____ and _____
I am curious what the next one will be.
I would have preferred irrelevantGet but WinGet is unambiguous enough.
Don't work for free on proprietary systems or single sponsor opensource is a lesson cheaper learned by watching others.
When people were warning against Microsoft on this forum they were just set aside as cynical, grumpy Unix-beards. If that happens even here, what do you think will happen elsewhere?
For example, I wanted to buy Win10 recently, and also wanted to sign up for Teams. Both experiences were so unimaginably ridiculously terrible, that I ended up cancelling the Teams subscriptions the same day and not buying Win10.
On the other hand .NET (Core), PowerShell, TypeScript and VS Code are all great things.
Which was inadverted addition of arsenic specific to Morinaga in Japan, and not Nestle. However, the committe which managed the case and dragged it on was not created by the company but the Japanese government consisting of a newspaper publisher (??), a hospital director, 2 lawyers and a human rights lecturer.
So it seems like an insufficiently related market and lack of oversight made this drag on causing many deaths and even more people crippled by arsenic. One person was sentenced to 3 years in prison.
Compare with China who executed 2 people involved in the 2008 milk scandal and gave much harsher sentences to others. Although that scandal was deliberate rather than a cover up of bad practices.
Never give them something for free, not one minute of my precious lifetime.
They seem to me as 'friendly' as the aliens in the "Mars attacks" movie.
WSL has been built for webdevs not to flock to *NIX from Windows, nothing else.
Even naming it "Windows Subsystem for Linux" is an insult, since it sounds as if it was something for Linux, when in reality it's a "Linux Subsystem for Windows" and doesn't benefit Linux itself in any way.
The developers of WSL have said* that was mostly a legal concern. Calling it “Linux Subsystem for Windows” (listing “Linux” first) has wider implications for copyright/licensing:
> Just who is allowed to call a product or service Linux, anyway?
> Linus Torvalds has an answer for that: Nobody. Not without his say-so.
> The term "Linux" is a trademark and Torvalds owns it. His assignee, an organization called the Linux Mark Institute (LMI), is empowered to collect licensing fees from companies and individuals who want to use the word commercially.
> - https://www.infoworld.com/article/2671387/linus-gets-tough-o...
*I think it was during a Microsoft Build 2020 Q&A with the WSL team, but I can't find the video on YouTube.
I too have been in a similar situation (being interviewed at a startup and being clearly not super enthusiastic about the position being offered) but they decided to go with somebody else they gave me a courtesy call letting me know about it. I think it's the right thing to do.
Alternatively, calling it something like Nix subsystem for Windows or maybe just LSW would also do the trick, this seems like a lame excuse.
The problem is people have short memories and are driven by convenience so will conveniently forget how evil a company is when they show another side. Or sometimes they can continue being evil and people still just do nothing because it's so convenient (see Amazon).
There is not enough direct experience of the evil for our monkey brains to make sense of it. If you see someone kill a baby with their own two hands you will never trade with that person again, they are dead to you full stop. If a company knowingly kills babies by proxy and extorts mothers you get mad for an afternoon then you forget. We need to evolve as a species or find some way to make it more real.
MSFT is treating open source communities and free F/OSS code contributions the way they might have treated blogging and IT forums in a prior era.
It's "developer community" and "power user" engagement. It's a hybrid product management and marketing function.
In this particular scenario, the winget product manager views the appget author as a "Windows enthusiast" of sorts, not a competitor, a peer, or a colleague. Just a "power user persona" of the Microsoft userbase.
So, when you understand this, reading the PM's email to him ahead of winget's launch makes more sense.
> We give appget a call out in our blog post too since we believe there will be space for different package managers on windows. You will see our package manager is based on GitHub too but obviously with our own implementation etc. our package manager will be open source too so obviously we would welcome any contribution from you.
Specifically: it's like getting called out explicitly by a forum mod, or being a frequent blog commenter who is mentioned by name in a blogger's main post.
It's "an honor" to have appget explicitly mentioned in an "official" Microsoft announcement. And to have your community work "inspire" so much of winget's design! So when the PM wrote the email, he probably wasn't even thinking it would feel like trolling. He was probably thinking, "isn't it cool we are doing this 'F/OSS collaboration thing' together? How 'New Microsoft' of us!"
And I can't say I blame him. Microsoft is just less smooth about their appropriation of F/OSS for marketing purposes. Other companies manage to do it without the developers noticing.
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's worth – and I'm not really sure whether it's helpful to say this, or whether it's even true – this situation often means "you didn't pass the interview."
The reason I mention it, is that it took an embarrassingly long time for me to understand this. Maybe it's common knowledge. But an identical situation happened to me at Magic Leap. I hesitate to mention their name, lest it sound like I'm calling them out or something, but I'm not. And in general I no longer feel negatively towards companies that end up doing that, so I don't think any particular stigma should be attached to Magic Leap for doing that.
I'm trying (and possibly failing) to share a personal experience of "I used to feel awful in situations like this; now I realize it's just business, and the decision of pass/fail has extraordinarily little to do with the skill of the programmer being interviewed, so don't take it as a sign of anything."
None of this is to undermine your overall point that it's generally not cool to ghost a candidate (to put it mildly), and that it'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've helped me to hear that at one point, so here it is, just in case.
Microsoft isn’t serious about supporting open source at all. It’s just a gimmicky ploy to get users back from Linux to Windows.
I wouldn't say that. It's a big company thing.
I mean, I believe that it's possible you're correct. But this is just such a foreign "does not compute" situation to me. Is the thought process something like "Sonarr is often used to download things against copyright law -> that's a no-no -> we don't do no-no's here"? I'm trying to phrase this as positively as I can, so I apologize if it sounds like I'm belittling the mindset or something. It's not like that.
(It's mildly unfair to Microsoft to imply that this could be the reason, since as a company policy Microsoft can't show up and say "Well actually, the reason we didn't hire was because X" – and this seems like it would be an outstandingly bad decision. Old Microsoft may have made decisions like this, but in recent years they've made some pretty impressive reforms.)
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.
It does not matter if Nadella is a nice guy. It does not matter if everyone reporting to him is a nice guy. They are still forced to operate with a megacorp filled with lizard people.
On the other hand, it might be just the usual confusion that large administrative structures needed for megacorps cause.
Linux users aren't more principled or anything than windows users. I'd go as far and say that people just want free stuff and some are willing to put more effort into it. We have no higher standards or morals and are no better than the windows or mac crowd.
Seems like Microsoft owning GitHub thinks all the code on GitHub belongs to Microsoft…
Many OSS projects (and pretty much all of mine) were started to scratch a particular itch, so if that itch gets scratched by another project, I'm not terribly concerned.
It's more problematic if the competition is a half assed solution that, by virtue of being backed by a larger company, still sucks the oxygen out of the space you're trying to serve.
Exactly
Anything mentioning or using BitTorrent is scary for these huge companies, because it's associated with piracy.
Sure, your deploy times to your container fleet can be 70% faster, but if you're using BitTorrent, it'll be very hard to push that through leadership.
There was a lot to be annoyed with npm about, but this isn't the kind of behaviour we should reward.
Apache license requires to preserve copyright notices, did you have any?
You have no obligation to continue hosting the MIT version, and you can release a new version of every commit under GPL.
I thought it was better named than Chocolatey or Scoop.
Edit: plan > pun. (no idea why I wrote plan, i think I wanted to write play)
I think I had a 200MB hard drive at the time.
I mean, not to shoot the messenger, you're right, that's exactly what it meant, but it isn't acceptable behaviour.
What I'm thinking of is a license almost identical to the MIT and/or Apache 2.0 license, but with a clause that prohibits mega-corps from wholesale rebranding and using your code.
I have a few OSS projects myself, and help maintain a larger one, and I love the spirit of OSS, so I'm a little split on this one. But I don't really think Microsoft's actions here are truely in the spirit of OSS. Yes, the license allows it, but is it aligned with the OSS ethos? Is it "right"?
Looks like all the bigger companies are doing this now.
That didn't happen in this case. They took the ideas, and took his knowledge by leading him on and interviewing him for an acqui-hire.
They didn't take his code (in C#) and rewrite it in to C++.
Many see that as a sign that they won't be 100% focused on the task at hand.
1. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/micro...
2. https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/18/21262103/microsoft-open-s...
At least in that instance, there was never anything overtly malicious happening. It was just your garden variety "banality of evil" 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's really hard to accomplish something that the bureaucracy isn't designed to handle, because that means that it's not really anybody'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'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'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.
> 5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
Probably, but it's not limited to Microsoft.
Any company where revenues are the highest goal (and all publicly traded companies should be this way; it'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.
Well in the author's case the tool was just as useful for them than for the others. Nothing wrong with helping the community, regardless of the ecosystem.
I've been anti-Microsoft for about 15 years but even I'll admit that I've warmed up to them over the past few years because of their seemingly good works (and amazing PR). Stuff like this helps me remember why healthy skepticism is still super important when it comes to giant companies like MS.
Note that it's pretty common for years to pass between the first and second stages of this process, and there are any number of reasons why acquisition negotiations can either suddenly accelerate (it becomes competitive, partnering isn't going to work as a fallback, the target is going out of business, the acquiring company needs to unload cash fast, ...) or slow down (partnering becomes more desirable than acquisition, 1st party development becomes competitive, various legal reasons intervene, business strategy shifts away from whatever made the acquisition interesting in the first place, org changes shift the focus away from the acquisition, ...).
To put an even finer point on it, a business is made of people. Individuals. The individuals involved behaved exceptionally poorly (to be charitable) toward another human being. How shameful of these individuals to act that way, and then (presumably) hide behind the collectivist shield of "the business".
Client side has a couple of options, including Yarn.
I just think Microsoft should have found a way to credit the guy. Even just a footnote in their WinGet announcement blog post would have been better.
It's pretty compelling, I predict they will pull in a lot of Apple (who use it for the terminal) devs and make a lot of Windows first devs very happy. And there are a lot.
Btw, am I downvoted because my original comment in not constructive or do people not agree with me?
[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/windows-terminal/9n0dx20hk...
pretty subjective, I'm guessing most people find terminal-based stuff easier/nicer on a computer with an actual keyboard, rather than a (relatively) small phone screen with a touchscreen keyboard.
I believe Termux is also pretty majorly restricted by Android 10 (can only run binary code included within the application package, so no downloading additional linux packages or compiling things locally, I believe)
This happened to one of my referrals so i know this firsthand.
This "Andrew" is isolated from everything by multiple levels of bureaucracy and regulations. Even if he wanted to make right, he would've just burned his accumulated clout it vain. Hire as a contractor? No matching position. Write a check? No such budget line item. Give a shout-out? Leave marketing to the marketing dept.
This seems like genericisation in trademarks to me. Sometimes things grow to be useful more broadly -- that seems like something to celebrate.
If you're railing against capitalism in general however, then I'm with you! Distribution of wealth shouldn't be left to a fight between a small cadre of corporation owners vs. the populous.
They could have approached the project owner, said they'd like to use the structure under the MIT license and offered a job/cash as a thank you for his dev time.
They could at least send the guy a fish, if his contribution was significant.
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'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'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't despair, you've made gift to community not Microsoft.
I was thinking more along the ideas of adding restrictions only for corporations of a certain size, or perhaps only if they intend to use it in a certain way - kind of like the licenses that exclude large cloud operators like AWS from using your work without contributing back.
But the viral nature of GPL and the notion of "derived works" may be of some use here.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go!_(programming_language)#Con...
'WinGet', a direct copy of 'AppGet', is not a friendly reference IMO.
I've also heard it expressed as "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence".
Although in this case I'm not sure organisational incompetence is necessarily a good enough explanation given there are ex-Microsofters in the discussion suggesting that people would actively have been weighing up whether or not to screw over Keivan. (Obviously I have no idea how likely that is to be true either.)
Microsoft has unusual ability to move swiftly, with all its weight it may be not graceful. That said they do not always extend and extinguish. Often they make clone and ride it
Oracle => MSSQL
Java => C#
AWS => Azure
To make objective decision it would be nice to have a list of Microsoft inspirations with their fate and Microsoft actions.
This furor is a surprising flip-flop given the usual "information wants to be free" and "patents for software are dumb" cheerleading that we usually see around here.
I think there's a lot of variation in the quality of your interview experience when you interview at Microsoft based on how on top of things the recruiter is, how much the hiring manager prioritizes candidate experience, and headcount/budget complexities. Some teams don't have recruiters, so then the candidate experience is whatever the hiring manager makes time for.
I don't doubt the horror stories. For context, several years ago I applied for three different roles. I got rejected at the resume screen for one of them, rejected after the first phone interview for another, and I ended up taking an offer from the third. For both rejections, I got the news by email notification through Microsoft's careers app, not from the recruiter or from the hiring manager. I think it's a really impersonal way to find out after you've already done an interview round.
The specific point I was making is that, contrary to the parent comment but not the sibling comment, there is a standard way of doing things that ends with following up with the candidate. And, as a candidate, you do have explicit ways of figuring out what happened to your application, even if finding out you failed an interview via an app is kind of shitty. It's definitely not standard to ghost the candidate.
However, Microsoft specifically has a history of being aggressively terrible in exactly this way, which is what I was referring to. For example, the time they talked with a company about an acquisition only to ghost them and totally steal their work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics#Microsoft_law...
If that's all the innovation that MSFT has supposedly 'copied'...
To my mind, it also means the interviewers didn't pass.
A company that's indifferent to the people it's hiring is unlikely to be magically different once you're in the door.
At least they were nice enough to pay you a trip to Seattle and (briefly) mentioned your project in the release announcement, I didn't even get a "thank you".
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.
I think I will not credit everyone on my comparison tables. I only credit who inspired me hugely. MS hasn't implemented everything AppGet had. I bet MS is waiting for public feedback for the next point. Acutally MS has its Roadmap: https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/blob/master/doc/wind...
For the spec, only two common options: YAML & JSON. And every YAML spec looks this way.
MS has other experiences like TypeScript Definition also. https://github.com/DefinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped/tree/mast...
Lets use github & opensource itself to ensure the Appget developers gets his fair share!
On the other hand "WinGet" sounds like "wing-it" i.e. release any piece of junk and fix later. Maybe. Which TBF does seem to be how Microsoft works anyway.
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't know what, but money in any case.
It's a very Microsoft-thing to do to copy someone else'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.
Years later I met one of the people who screwed me over — they’d left that company by then — and they apologized.
You don'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).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics#Microsoft_law...
And sure enough they understand OSS for what it is better than anyone else. Thank you, creative person, here is your exposure.
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.
That's what I don't get about people who don't think this is a big deal. That a license is open source does not mean it is without conditions.
I'm an architect, so just keen to understand your architecture on the backend :)
MS and many others don'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't ever accept it. But they embrace any other software without restrictions on top of "OSS", if not so, they just create its own "permissive" 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't really "love" OSS.
I think the simpler explanation is that US v Microsoft and other anti-trust action combined with their declining fortunes scared them for a while, causing them to perform goodness. But now that the heat's off and they're on the upswing, they're returning to old patterns.
We'll see which explanation fits better over time. But it was all of two days ago that the Slack CEO, not given to hyperbole, said that Microsoft is "unhealthily preoccupied with killing us": https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/26/21270421/slack-ceo-stewar...
So I don't think my view is unreasonable.
Firstly, with the shift to the cloud, cross-platform was inevitably going to become more important - Linux is much loved in the server space.
Secondly, they realised the importance of developers in the shift to the cloud - their cloud, Azure, and also their DevOps tooling, Azure DevOps (and later Github).
Do I think their positive moves were altruistic? No, of course not - they are a corporation, a public one at that, and ultimately must generate money for their stakeholders.
But that doesn't mean their positive moves can't benefit me, or the development community, at the same time.
Honestly, the embrace & extinguish thing became a tired meme long ago; Microsoft are not somehow special in occasionally fucking someone over - every large corporation does this. It doesn't excuse it, of course, but the point is it's not a "Microsoft thing", and it doesn't invalidate all the goodwill they have generated in the past decade or so.
MS already had a "package manager" called OneGet. They also have a package manager called NuGet.
I don't see any issue with MS replacing OneGet with WinGet.
Or why the name WinGet offends AppGet, or AptGet, or OneGet, or NuGet, etc.
I think [name]Get is pretty common.
> Code being copied isn't an issue.
I looked at both repos and they share no code at all.
In his article, the author claims that " If I were the patenting type, this would be the thing you would patent. ps. I don't regret not patenting anything."
That's really not how patents work, and looking at the repo, a second year CS student could do the same really. I don'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's nothing to acquire since there'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's front page will probably bring a lot more eyeballs to the startups he's trying to promote. So congratulation for the free advertising!
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/28/21272964/microsoft-winget...
Both of these claims are pretty easy to dismiss by simply looking at the respective repositories. They share nothing.
Microsoft doesn't let any open source build of VS Code access the VS Code Marketplace. Heavily reduces the benefit of VS Code being open source when you can't use any extension or service built for it without building it yourself.
https://github.com/cdr/code-server/blob/master/doc/FAQ.md#di...
My former employer is still using it and saving yearly multiple times my previous 6 digit salary, so I got a nice promotion out of it before I left.
It also helped me get my current job at AWS(pretty much half of the interview I was just talking about how I built it), and I now make some $500 monthly (before tax) from a few users who pay for official binaries.
I'm now only working on it occasionally, just enough to maintain this income stream, but previously I put a lot of time and effort into building it.
My motivation to work on it plummeted when I saw those companies reap the benefits of my hard work without giving anything back.
I meant to include both in "reverse engineering".
What I was trying to say was that the large products where MS has failed spectacularly don't seem to me to be products from some other company that they reverse engineered. They seem to me to be products MS thought up itself. MS is better at co-opting ideas invented by others than at inventing its own.
after all this is over, I'll probably do a write up of hall it all worked behind the scene + all the server code.
https://opensource.microsoft.com/pdf/microsoft-contribution-...
As to the reason for the change I think we're saying the same thing. If they could have snuffed out Linux, they would have. Their ongoing antitrust problems helped prevent that, allowing the Linux ecosystem to flourish. They have since been unable to abuse the power that they no longer have.
Again, time will tell if you're right thinking that Microsoft is merely just as awful as other large companies. But reasonable people can assume that it will be just as bad as before if they regain their power.
plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
It's been a while, but I managed to corrupt oneget/package management on windows within a month of it being released; I spent about a week trying to fix it and eventually figured out what the problem was (though I've since forgotten the details) only to find it unfixable without reinstalling Windows.
Unfortunately, reinstalling Windows means Office won't reactivate--I've taken it into a Microsoft store, and they couldn't help me.
No. From the source:
> the core mechanics, terminology, the manifest format and structure, even the package repository’s folder structure, are very inspired by AppGet.
In the update it's slightly more vague, but there's no claim of coffee being copied there either:
> Code being copied isn't an issue. I knew full well what it meant to release something opensource and I don't regret it one bit.
And continues to be more explicit about his complaint:
> What was copied with no credit is the foundation of the project.
Lastly, looking at the repo really doesn't tell you if you could get a patent on it.
Yes, I get to use Linux tools from Windows, helping keep me on Windows.
But it also means I'm more likely to build/test/fix my junk on Linux, helping me reduce my absolute and pre-existing dependency on Windows.
Apache 2.0 by the looks of things.
Interesting question would be whether WinGet is a "derivative work" of AppGet.
The original problem the brew developers seemed to have with MacPorts (no binary distribution) is now resolved and MP retains all of the flexibility of a source-based package manager.
I also “like” sudoing package installation/removal of system packages. It’s no different from any other Unix package manager. If I’m the only user, I can chown /opt/local Or install to my home directory and run MP without sudo.
He goes to say that "If I were the patenting type, this would be the thing you would patent. ps. I don't regret not patenting anything."
I mean come on. Every package has a .yaml manifest where there's a download link for every architecture, a hash, a version and an installation recipe. There's nothing to patent here. It would be extremely hard to argue there's no prior art, considering most languages and distributions have been shipping with package managers built just like these for years. Even my text editor has one!
Realistically, the author managed to get a lot of attention for his other startup for almost no cost. By bashing the company that's trendy to bash right now.
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.
Ever heard of NuGet[0]? Been around since 2010.
WinGet isn't a fork of AppGet, the codebases share nothing.
I wonder if things would have been different, if the product was licensed under Gplv3. If so, he could demand to check if Microsoft violated the license https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-violation.en.html (to check if this is a completely new rewrite for example).
Update: Ah looks like Winget was sourced in C++, and Appget is in C#
You may or may not think that's a fine thing to do, but it is the only thing you can pretend Sonarr is for.
I'm not even sure if the author's idea was original anyway. It looked more a CLI program to download and run installers.
Also, they have now corrected the credit: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/winget-install-le...
They don't share any code. As far as copyright law is concerned, it is not a derivative work.
They didn't use any of AppGet's code.
Though nobody is questioning whether what MS did was legal. The issue is whether it was moral.