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.
It seems toothless to me. A relic from a byegone era when companies cared about ethical behavior.
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...
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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.
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.
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/CopyFair_License
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Copyfarleft
https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/copyfarleft-and-...
He also has refused to release any of his projects under GPLv3 (or even “v2 or later”).
For anyone who doesn't get this reference:
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].
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Looks like all the bigger companies are doing this now.
1. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/micro...
2. https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/18/21262103/microsoft-open-s...
> 5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
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...
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.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go!_(programming_language)#Con...
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.)
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.
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...
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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics#Microsoft_law...
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.
> 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...
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...
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-...
Apache 2.0 by the looks of things.
Interesting question would be whether WinGet is a "derivative work" of AppGet.
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#
Also, they have now corrected the credit: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/winget-install-le...