The Day AppGet Died

Keivan obviously got screwed.

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.)

Your implication that "untested in court" means "likely unenforceable" is quite wrong--unless you see lots of people openly violating a license in cases where it would be economic to pursue them, the more likely explanation for "untested" is simply that the accused infringers get competent legal advice, and comply without wasting their money on a losing court case. Though as other comments note, since the writing of that essay someone (D-Link) finally did refuse to comply without a court order, at which point Harald Welte took them to court and D-Link indeed lost.

And what do you think "not able to prosecute" means? District attorneys (or non-USA equivalents) decide when to prosecute crimes, not private copyright owners. It's very rare for the criminal justice system to intervene in complicated white-collar stuff, especially when a straightforward civil remedy is available. A legal realist might say that means the GPL--and indeed most copyrights beyond those infringed by warez/torrentz sites--is effectively unenforceable criminally, and would in a useful sense be right; but it's enforceable civilly, so no one cares much.

Which I don't find all that weird. Quoting OP here; "after visiting the campus, I wasn’t too sure I wanted to work for such a big company, also moving from Canada to the U.S. wasn’t something I was too excited about".

In the past, I've been in talks with an employer about a job, and my enthousiasm was only so-so, and that tended to put a brake on the proceedings.

Indeed. There was a windows services for Unix subsystem based on Xenix mentioned elsewhere and that was based on the subsystem architecture.

When you use it, you get a nice Korn shell and it is built on PE binaries linked against PSDLL.DLL. there's a functioning but very old version of GCC that ships with it.

The PE binaries mark up the desired subsystem to be invoked so you don't have to be in the environment to execute one - the kernel takes over.

PSDLL acts as a translation layer for NT much as kernel32 does for win32. You can't run unmodified Linux binaries like you can with wsl. On the other hand, WSL requires that you invoke lxss with some special com magic to get access to Linux first so you can't just exec an elf file directly. The Pico processes you mentioned - these allow the kernel to install specific handlers/translators of their syscall functionality into the windows kernel.

So yeah architecturally they're pretty different and WSL isn't really the same subsystem concept they started with. On the other hand it that's probably a good thing because everything needed a rebuild for SUA.

Can confirm.

Heck, I’ve been given an interview day for a c-level position at a billion dollar company by the entire executive team and board only to never hear back from them again.