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The Day AppGet Died

keivan.io

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Re: The Day AppGet Died

#91

Post by alpb »

There are parts of Microsoft that understand open source. Most parts of the Windows team ain’t that (exceptions apply). Reading this saddens me a lot as he clearly got screwed. But this is why any project with momentum should consider growing its community and maybe forming a foundation.

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.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#92

Post by alpb »

kayone wrote: post #80

Author here, Because it's sure to come up here is a comment I wrote on Reddit that clarifies somethings, I haven't updated the original article since I'm not sure what the etiquette for updating a highly shared article is. ------ 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 projec…

If you patented your idea, I think you would antagonize and scare away a lot of people from participating in the open source project.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#93

Post by lukeschlather »

The really sad thing is that I still don't think Microsoft has actually solved the package manager problem in any meaningful way. WinGet feels like just yet another subtly incompatible package standard.

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.)

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#94

Post by alpb »

intern4tional wrote: post #49
ak39 wrote: post #7

Man, 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.

This isn't secret news, but when you interview at MS there is always a secret / hidden interviewer. This is publicly known information from Cracking the Coding interview. This person is called the as appropriate and you only meet them if you pass all the prior interviews. 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…

He was talking about the money was discussed even before coming into the interviews. This makes me think if he was brought to a sham on-site interview in the first place.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#95

Post by [deleted] »

13of40 wrote: post #86
kayone wrote: post #80

Author here, Because it's sure to come up here is a comment I wrote on Reddit that clarifies somethings, I haven't updated the original article since I'm not sure what the etiquette for updating a highly shared article is. ------ 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 projec…

Can you go into more detail about which features you believe were copied?

[deleted]

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#96

Post by ahmedalsudani »

13of40 wrote: post #86
kayone wrote: post #80

Author here, Because it's sure to come up here is a comment I wrote on Reddit that clarifies somethings, I haven't updated the original article since I'm not sure what the etiquette for updating a highly shared article is. ------ 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 projec…

Can you go into more detail about which features you believe were copied?

From the article:

> Do you want to know how Microsoft WinGet works? go read the article I wrote 2 years ago about how AppGet works.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#97

Post by kayone »

alpb wrote: post #92
kayone wrote: post #80

Author here, Because it's sure to come up here is a comment I wrote on Reddit that clarifies somethings, I haven't updated the original article since I'm not sure what the etiquette for updating a highly shared article is. ------ 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 projec…

If you patented your idea, I think you would antagonize and scare away a lot of people from participating in the open source project.

I'm not really interested in patents or regret not patenting anything. I just used patents to try to explain what was taken, and not attributed.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#98

Post by fraggle222 »

lostmsu wrote: post #72
fraggle222 wrote: post #16

Not 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…

Out of curiosity, how long the process took until the deal was signed?

I had to go back and look it was a while back, it took longer than I remembered it. The initial reach out was in May 2011. I had some initial conversation with them in May and June, sent them some overview of the company, etc. Then didn't hear back for a while. In December 2011 conversations started back up. By then the company had actually launched a product where they could see my business being useful. I sent them some small amount of data as a sample. I had actually proposed a simpler lower cost proposal of them just purchasing the data they wanted and not the business or acquiring me to work there. Anyway sometime at beginning of Feb 2012, things started to move faster and then it was done by beginning of March 2012. So in my mind/memory it was really January 2012 to beginning of March but really started in May 2011.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#99

Post by fabianhjr »

lostmsu wrote: post #13
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The P2P Foundation has some writings on licenses they label as "copyfair", "copyfarleft", and "copyjustright"

https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/CopyFair_License

https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Copyfarleft

https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/copyfarleft-and-...

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#100

Post by jasonhansel »

This is why it's important to license FOSS projects under the (A)GPL, rather than the MIT license. It makes it far less profitable for companies to steal your ideas/code, and ensures that anything based on your work will put users first.
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