The title of this should really be changed to the more descriptive subtitle: "The story of how Microsoft embraced and then killed AppGet."
Not really. Afterall his AppGet package was open source....
The Day AppGet Died
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Re: The Day AppGet Died
#12The story reminds me of Andy Hertzfeld’s Switcher:
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.
Re: The Day AppGet Died
#13That is exactly why I am not open sourcing my .NET bindings for TensorFlow.
I don't know the details of your project, but what if you open sourced under the GPL? 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 gi…
That would not have helped MongoDB. I considered their new license, but it seemed tailored to their specifics. So maybe more research is required.
Perhaps a variant of CC-BY NC would be better, but it is not tailored to code.
Re: The Day AppGet Died
#14I wonder if one day we'll know of all the stories of people who got wined-dined-fucked by the large corporations who then release their own version of an existing product.
I doubt it. I've hinted at in comments here in the past, but I have one such story. It's a footnote, at best, in MS's history, and a thing for a now-dead product, but they turned what I thought was a cool product into their own thing then disappeared it through internal MS politics. 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 ca…
How could a gigantic corporation stealing your idea be seen as negative?
Re: The Day AppGet Died
#15Man, this hurt to read. Keivan’s response is the right one. But I wonder if the arrangements and outcome would have been different had AppGet been closed source. This is just not cricket from team Microsoft.
> I wonder if the arrangements and outcome would have been different had AppGet been closed source. 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.
I don't think so. There have been quite a few larger products, where Microsoft failed spectacularly.
Re: The Day AppGet Died
#16Not sure how MSFT usually handles it, but when I was acqui-hired (by a different large tech company, not quite on MSFT scale, but no trifle) I dealt almost exclusively with a person from Business Development. Maybe it is a bad sign that they had you discussing with people in their engineering group directly. Sounds like they were gathering data from you with no real plan to acquire. Then again every company may do it differently.
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.
Re: The Day AppGet Died
#17That is exactly why I am not open sourcing my .NET bindings for TensorFlow.
How much will that really change the likelihood of MS reimplementing it?
They didn't take any of the AppGet code, just the ideas.
Re: The Day AppGet Died
#18Microsoft is really good at copying. I mean this in as value-neutral a way as possible.
Are they also good at deciding when to copy? They could just have taken and possibly improved AppGet's code.
Re: The Day AppGet Died
#19When you release free (as in freedom) software, you are not entitled to revenue sharing when people use or modify that software, or if people use the ideas in that software to make new, from-scratch software.
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.)
Re: The Day AppGet Died
#20That is exactly why I am not open sourcing my .NET bindings for TensorFlow.
I don't know the details of your project, but what if you open sourced under the GPL? 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 gi…
By Eben Moglen's own admission[0], the GPL has never been successfully enforced in a court of law, even against criminal infringers.
It seems toothless to me. A relic from a byegone era when companies cared about ethical behavior.