zlacker

Exactly that: you open-sourced it so it's your donation to the world. Don't be sour if someone copies your idea or makes a ton of money from it.

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.

>>thePun+(OP)
I agree with this outlook. However, I don't know how I'd react if this were to happen to me. If I do something out of altruism and somebody takes it and makes money off it, I guess it leaves a bad taste? Other than that, I think this approach is done everyday by every developer, whether they take code from other softwares or from StackOverflow, very rarely do they credit or even give reference to where the code has been taken from.

>>thunde+B1
My only fear would be them turning it around and preventing me or others from using the idea in the future with their big squad of lawyers. They wouldn't even need a legitimize claim to pull it off.

>>thePun+(OP)
Virtually all open source licenses require at least the inclusion of the original copyright notice in all derivative works. Now, if the code itself were altered in superficial ways, but the structure and mechanism were essentially the same, it is kind of a grey area.

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.

>>kgwxd+J2
That would be very difficult since there would be prior art.

>>thePun+Wx
They don't have to win the case, just the power of fear.

>>kgwxd+Rc1
The prior art is so obvious that it wouldn't create any fear, merely a mild distraction at best.

>>thePun+9e2
An expensive distraction.

>>lliama+nb
The fact is Microsoft didn't copy anything except the idea, and you don't need attribution for that. Winget was rewritten entirely from scratch and there was no open-source involved.

I'm not even sure if the author's idea was original anyway. It looked more a CLI program to download and run installers.