On a tangentially related note: how did getdeb.net die? Used to use this a decade ago, but then suddenly the domain went blank and now is taken over by a squatter I see.
The Day AppGet Died
301–310 of 566 posts
Re: The Day AppGet Died
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can say I’m a bit upset on your behalf. Actually acquiring the code would have cost Microsoft very little money, would have ended up with a better product and also would have brought along the current user space in a very graceful manner.
They didn’t even need to acquire - MIT license means they could just fork it and use it as they preferred, keeping his name in the About screen that nobody reads. But it would have looked bad. So they did this and... it looks even worse.
There's no common code between the projects; they're not even written in the same language. It's hard to say it's a "fork". They both just use yaml manifest files on GitHub as a registry (which could be good for appget! It should be easier to set it up as a trusted package registry with verified non-malicious packages!). That's the commonality. I'm not sure we should grant monopoly on _broad architure choices_ when software patents are already considered so toxic. And appget _did_ at least get a callout in the release announcement, so it _was_ mentioned as an inspiration, in the same breath as chocolatey and others...
The meat of this blog post, to me, seems like the terrible hiring pipeline with no feedback. That seems like a really bad experience. I can only imagine that someone really dropped a ball somewhere.
Re: The Day AppGet Died
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
Calling it "WinGet" was the real punch in the gut. Does Microsoft select for assholes or something? There's a thousand other package manager names [1] in the wild and they chose that one. So much for "developers, developers, developers"... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_package_manag...
In all fairness: - "NuGet" is super-popular in .NET circles (included in Visual Studio by default) - "apt-get" is the classic tool for Windows Subsystem for Linux So "WinGet" certainly "makes sense" as a name without being a direct ripoff of AppGet
> "apt-get" is the classic tool for Windows Subsystem for Linux
APT is the classic tool for debian-like Linux distributions. FTFY
Re: The Day AppGet Died
#304Not 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…
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Re: The Day AppGet Died
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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…
I think the reason this process was used is because if you are some random employee at Microsoft, you don't have the ability to just acquire a company. You probably don't even know who to look for to ask for such a thing. But what you can do is create a req for a position and refer someone you know for it.
I am guessing that the average "higher up" at Microsoft does not know what AppGet is, or even what the priorities for package management in Windows are. It's just not a high level strategy thing, it's a low level engineering thing.
Re: The Day AppGet Died
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 com…
About Nestlé's poison baby formula: I though their baby formula was safe, but the problem is that they gave it away (maybe still do?) for free to new mothers in developing countries and when the mothers stopped lactating (because their own milk wasn't being drunk) they made the price hopelessly unaffordable so now the babies couldn't drink from either source, or at least needed to over-dilute the formula. Totally rea…
That's more recent. A long time ago (and I'm working from memory, so best to fact check anything I say, because my memory is terrible) it was common to use a particular rat poison in dry milk (and I forget exactly what it was). There were certain standards as to how much rat poison you were allowed to have. It was well known that this would kill a small percentage of babies, but it was thought to be a reasonable tradeoff at the time. To be fair, it wasn't just Nestle. In Japan, the dairy giant Morinaga had the exact same problem. I believe there were law suits that dragged on for literal generations and eventually things changed.
Re: The Day AppGet Died
#307Not 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…
That's what I was thinking. How would a company approach you if they were genuinely considering purchasing your product? And how if they want to brain rape you?
Maybe being contacted by a product manager or engineer should make you cautious.
Re: The Day AppGet Died
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The most cynic part of this story is sending him an email the day before the launch with a heads-up that WinGet was launching. And the icing on the cake is the "btw, we are giving you the exclusive so keep it secret". Like, wtf. He ain't TechCrunch. Why the fuck are they giving him that exclusive? Nothing yells "we stole your stuff, but dude it was open source so you really can't complain, and thanks for the idea" mo…
what is the point of an exclusive if you have to keep it secret - I mean if he were TechCrunch for example, if he got the exclusive I guess he should publish, isn't that the point of an exclusive? I find it a very confusing phrase.
Re: The Day AppGet Died
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
MacPorts (né DarwinPorts) was created by Apple engineers long before the App Store existed. IMHO it’s superior to Homebrew in just about every way, existed long before Homebrew and targets the same audience (unlike the App Store which is targeting a very different population). If you haven’t looked at MP lately, it’s worth reviewing.
Used it in the days it required everything to run as root (Sudo). Then discovered homebrew and have never looked back. Every package I've looked at is better maintained on brew. Why do you think MP is superior?
Installing packages for your system as a non-root user is fairly broken and Homebrew jumps through a number of questionable hoops to make this work.
Re: The Day AppGet Died
#310There 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…
MacPorts (né DarwinPorts) was created by Apple engineers long before the App Store existed. IMHO it’s superior to Homebrew in just about every way, existed long before Homebrew and targets the same audience (unlike the App Store which is targeting a very different population). If you haven’t looked at MP lately, it’s worth reviewing.
MacPorts still has a number of Apple engineers contributing to it, although it is no longer an Apple-sponsored project and I have no idea if they are doing so in any professional capacity.
Homebrew, interestingly, has been moving towards an App Store-esque “binary distribution platform” for a while now.