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.)
If they stole his unpatented ideas then there's nothing.
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.
If more stories like this one come out I'm sure the goodwill turns fast.
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.
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.
Both of these claims are pretty easy to dismiss by simply looking at the respective repositories. They share nothing.
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.
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.