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The Day AppGet Died

keivan.io

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Re: The Day AppGet Died

#451

Post by pbhjpbhj »

bitlevel wrote: post #418
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…

It would appear that you have been 'Sherlocked' ( https://www.howtogeek.com/297651/what-does-it-mean-when-a-co... ) but by Microsoft. Looks like all the bigger companies are doing this now.

Hmm, it's not like f.lux were the only ones doing it. If they were the first, then credit to them for the concept (and for the software, I'm not belittling it).

This seems like genericisation in trademarks to me. Sometimes things grow to be useful more broadly -- that seems like something to celebrate.

If you're railing against capitalism in general however, then I'm with you! Distribution of wealth shouldn't be left to a fight between a small cadre of corporation owners vs. the populous.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#452

Post by raymond_goo »

toyg wrote: post #359
wwwigham wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Nobody talked about granting monopoly, it's just about common courtesy really. They basically strung him along before cloning his tool in the dark, when they could have done it in the open in various different ways. After the failed hire, just give him a heads-up like "hey, we really like your stuff but for various reasons we can't hire you and we need to rewrite it, what about we make this manifest a bit of a common…

this.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#453

Post by pbhjpbhj »

toyg wrote: post #288
hmottestad wrote: post #181

Earlier 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.

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. (Pretty much my maxim).

They could have approached the project owner, said they'd like to use the structure under the MIT license and offered a job/cash as a thank you for his dev time.

They could at least send the guy a fish, if his contribution was significant.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#454

Post by tuesday20 »

Conan_Kudo wrote: post #184
tuesday20 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they’re getting bad PR now for screwing the author over ...

No, they're not. That's the point . The problem is that nobody cares outside of here. If it shows up on a prominent Windows news site/blog, then I would consider it a PR disaster. But that hasn't yet happened.

Microsoft is a tech company. Getting bad PR among techies is pretty bad for them. Maybe not as bad as bad PR with general public, still bad...

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#455

Post by aporetics »

mumblemumble wrote: post #431
wpietri wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes. The new Microsoft, same as the old Microsoft. I am really sorry this happened to you. On the scale of Microsoft, or even on the scale of what they're putting into this effort, it would have cost approximately nothing to give you an "acquisition" you would have been happy with. If the job didn't work out, they could have given you a fat consulting contract for a year or two. Or they just could have written you…

Reducing this down to a Microsoft thing is a bit hasty. Apple has done it. IBM has done it. And, when I was working for a less well-known company, I once burned a whole lot of social capital trying to prevent it from happening. At least in that instance, there was never anything overtly malicious happening. It was just your garden variety "banality of evil" situation. The existing corporate decision-making structures…

That’s not really what “banality of evil” means: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#456

Post by andrew_ »

GordonS wrote: post #417

I know this might be unpopular with OSS idealists, but I wonder if it might be time for a new license, or indeed if there are already (small 'o') open source licenses that would help with this sort of things. What I'm thinking of is a license almost identical to the MIT and/or Apache 2.0 license, but with a clause that prohibits mega-corps from wholesale rebranding and using your code. I have a few OSS projects mysel…

Exactly why I started relicensing all of my projects under MPL-2.0. The decision followed an attempt by a webpack team member to wholesale copy a project of mine into the project without attribution or licensing (which is a separate issue). Decided then and there that I needed something more restrictive that still allowed for collaboration.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#457

Post by GoblinSlayer »

dmix wrote: post #264
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…

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...

>Calling it "WinGet" was the real punch in the gut.

Should they name it "wget"?

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#458

Post by sergeykish »

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…

It is a sad day. But let my congratulate you.

You and countless other made impossible. Created community Microsoft could not ignore. It had to adopt, it had to change. Scary beast really. It does not know how to work with, it knows how to ride.

It took path you've paved. I see it - there is no dependency resolution, no make dependencies - as simple as possible so people can participate. More like Flatpack than apt.

Microsoft does not like fragmentation. There would be a big pull of users. It's interesting how they are going to fight mallware, spyware, ransomware. Issues like chrome Stylish and npm leftpad. With all respect it is not clear you could manage it, there is quite a list in the queue [0].

Please don't despair, you've made gift to community not Microsoft.

[0] https://github.com/appget/appget.packages/pulls

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#459

Post by GordonS »

nojs wrote: post #426
GordonS wrote: post #417

I know this might be unpopular with OSS idealists, but I wonder if it might be time for a new license, or indeed if there are already (small 'o') open source licenses that would help with this sort of things. What I'm thinking of is a license almost identical to the MIT and/or Apache 2.0 license, but with a clause that prohibits mega-corps from wholesale rebranding and using your code. I have a few OSS projects mysel…

Wouldn’t that be GPL?

No, that puts restrictions on everyone, which are so harsh many organisations (even startups) wouldn't touch GPL'd code with a bargepole.

I was thinking more along the ideas of adding restrictions only for corporations of a certain size, or perhaps only if they intend to use it in a certain way - kind of like the licenses that exclude large cloud operators like AWS from using your work without contributing back.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#460

Post by 0xCMP »

robert_g wrote: post #386
ximeng wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully they also weigh in the fact that screwing developers over is terrible publicity. Assume 100k developers see this and are slightly less inclined to trust MS in future, this bad publicity could easily cost them 1mn USD plus. A good will gesture of 100k USD at the start for consulting could have saved everyone a lot of trouble. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23332123 elsewhere in this thread for an e…

I worked for a brand & marketing company for 15 years and I observed that most of my clients had pretty short memories when it came to how they felt about me. If the last few milestones were really great they quickly forgot an incident. Obviously, the more impactful an incident, the longer/more positive milestones had to be. An incident too impactful got your fired - but, in general, this was my experience. Even in t…

Very true. People currently love VS Code and it makes their life much easier. I remember for a long time .NET friends of mine would extol Microsoft just cause Visual Studio worked really well with C#. Microsoft could do no wrong as long they could seamlessly work on Windows Apps.
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