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The Day AppGet Died

keivan.io

231–240 of 566 posts

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#231
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of: https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en How exactly could a PM interview process (which is just asking you to walk through a bunch of design scenarios) give a stronger hiring signal than having developed a product the company wanted to acqui-hire? Honestly somewhat insulting that they made him go through a full external interview loop. At most it should have been some informal chats…

> Honestly somewhat insulting that they made him go through a full external interview loop. Wait, what? So if someone is a "name brand" celebrity, they should get to jump the queue and coast by with an "informal chat?" How is that fair? I don't care if I'm interviewing John Carmack, he's getting the same evaluation process I would give to any other senior candidate. Software Engineering's got enough problems with int…

That's absurd. What he has built literally demonstrates he has the ability that the role requires - which is entirely what the entire interview loop is trying to ascertain. If you can ascertain that a person has a skillset without that loop, it is completely unnecessary.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#233
post #163
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What point exactly are you trying to make ?

The post was trying to imply that because the project was open source, it's a free-for-all for microsoft to just take and modify for their own needs. And that is exactly what happened.

Honestly the tech innovation of AppGet while good, isn't something groundbreaking. Manifests have been used by other package managers in the past. Yes it's stinks he didn't get more credit, but IMO it's blown out of proportion.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#235

I don't want to support this company. What are good alternatives to GitHub, TypeScript, npm, and Visual Studio Code (besides Atom)?

The smaller you are, the greater the risk of adopting SaaS like GitHub IMO, so I've used a lot of the alternatives. I try to run everything I can behind the firewall: - Gitea for a light weight Git GUI. I don't want pure GitHub SaaS and with GitLab you need to drink the Kool-Aid and marry your workflow to it. GitLab is also really stubborn about their business model and the pricing sucks once you get off the free ver…

> Drone for CI

I'm a fan of Drone, might not have every feature ever, but I used it at my old job and it was glorious. It ran without issue, just silently sat there and diligently built things quickly without complaint. I didn't realise how good it was until I had to use Azure DevOps.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point, why not keep it going? Your story is good enough reason to keep working and build a community and/or foundation around AppGet.

Can't think of a more wasted effort then trying to compete with maintaining a package manager in your spare time than a clone from the OS vendor who can out resource, outspend, out market, out evangelize, out reach you, etc. It would a futile endeavour, a realization acknowledged by the author, any further dev cycles on it would be wasted & are better spent elsewhere.

I'm not so sure about this because I believe package managers are one of those things that's best maintained outside of a commercial OS vendor, though one might consider RedHat as a counterexample.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#237
post #108

This was definitely not a great experience, but my hunch is what happened is some higher ups decided no, they don't need to hire you, the original team tells recruiting to notify you, recruiting drops the ball somehow, team goes on with their lives believing that you were told they were no longer interested, and everyone (except you, since you never got notified) believed the whole thing was resolved. The original pe…

> some higher ups decided no, they don't need to hire you Total misjudgment on their part. Thanks to this one HN post they already lost in terms of developer good will way more than his potential salary would be. Every time anyone who uses WinGet, who read this, will think 'oh, yeah, that's the tool that Microsoft build their version of behind original author's back, while stringing him and ghosting for few months".

Realistically, though, a year from now nobody will care. I mean, I started in this industry in the "MS is outright evil" era. How many people did they screw over? If I remember correctly, there was even a guy who was owed a pile of stock/stock options and when he got cancer they suddenly went missing (no need to pay the dead guy!). Day by day, year by year, these misdeeds are seen as irrelevant. MS is a different company these days (almost literally). Should we hold them accountable for their past sins forever? (I have a friend who still refuses to buy products from Nestle given their ancient "poison in baby formula is OK as long as it saves us money" stance. That's older than I am!)

In reality, these kinds of antics just don't hurt companies significantly -- even ridiculously horrible things that are arguably crimes against humanity (have I invoked Godwin's law?) In comparison to some of the incredibly awful things companies do (and get away with), this is minor to the point of not even being a footnote in the annals of evil (note to self: don't google that term to check the spelling...).

However, there will be a few of us who will be reminded of why we don't do business with MS (and hence will have no need of WinGet). It won't make any difference, but it will be there.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#238

I have a sneaking suspicion that part of the reason for the sudden radio-silence after his on-campus interview is that someone up the chain realized he is also the creator of Sonarr and just nobody wanted to take ownership of that potential liability.

There is no liability of a pre existing side project that they had no part in.

No but there is bad press

"Microsoft is paying someone who develops piracy software"

The half assed articles from TechCrunch and such will cause a lot of drama around MS they simply don't want.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#239

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.

They didn’t copy the code, just the APIs and ideas. In another words, if ideas were copyrighted, GNU/Linux wouldn’t exist.

Well, as the law stands now, due to Google v Oracle, APIs are copyrighted. Hopefully the Supreme Court will fix that in the coming months (they’ve agreed to hear the case), but, as of now, that’s the law.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#240
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking someone all the way through the interview process, then ghosting them, is doing something wrong. Add in the fact that they had planned on buying his app outright told him they would hire him instead to speed up the process, and it's an especially crummy thing to do.

I’m not sure I agree with that. No news is the equivalent of all other times: no deal/no hire. I think the game theoretic optimal choice from a liability standpoint is to simply stop sending further messages if you decide not to do business with someone, especially given all of the current litigation-happy people there are out there these days. (Even if you win a suit, you lose lots of money.) It avoids the possibili…

It’s possible for something to be “protocol”, but also rude at the same time
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