Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Day AppGet Died

keivan.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 566 posts

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#471

Post by macspoofing »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #448
hoytschermerhrn wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying that it’s just “a big company thing” is giving Microsoft a pass here. Look at their recent PR: wanting to embrace the developer community [1], their love of open source [2], etc. While AppGet may be an isolated story, I’m inclined to believe that MSFT is simply acting they way they’ve always have — by embracing, by extending, and by extinguishing. 1. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/micro…

What happened to AppGet is not what embrace, extend, extinguish means. This strategy refers to writing software compatible with existing dominant software surrounding some shared interop (e.g. a file format they can both read, web standards they both implement, a networking protocol so they can communicate with eachother, etc), gaining market dominance, then making your once compatible software incompatible. Absolute…

Yeah, that's exactly what I had in mind. Microsoft had a very specific modus operandi in their bad old days, that was different then what they did with AppGet. Here they basically acted like a regular big company trampling over a small company. You'd be hard-pressed to find any big company that hasn't done that. I remember, for example, when Google created 'Go' lang, they didn't care that there was an existing programming language named 'Go!'[1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go!_(programming_language)#Con...

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#472

Post by arcticfox »

hoffs wrote: post #389
tiagod wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does AppGet compete with apt-get?

It's not about competing, it's about naming

To me, context matters. 'AppGet' sounds like a friendly hat tip to the legendary apt-get, given that they don't compete.

'WinGet', a direct copy of 'AppGet', is not a friendly reference IMO.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#473

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

michaelt wrote: post #350
dmix wrote: post #264

Earlier 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...

> Calling it "WinGet" was the real punch in the gut. I feel for the guy, but someone who called their package manager "app get" in 2014 when "apt get" has existed for since 1998 is in no position to take umbrage at a competing package manager having a six-letter name ending in get.

I think the authors umbrage is not about naming it that, but them copying his project after this whole process and then naming it that and still not really crediting him.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#474

Post by daemin »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #375
modernerd wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even naming it "Windows Subsystem for Linux" is an insult… The developers of WSL have said* that was mostly a legal concern. Calling it “Linux Subsystem for Windows” (listing “Linux” first) has wider implications for copyright/licensing: > Just who is allowed to call a product or service Linux, anyway? > Linus Torvalds has an answer for that: Nobody. Not without his say-so. > The term "Linux" is a trademark and Tor…

Are you telling me MS could not be bothered to even ask Linus? And if there's a fee to pay it? They're a multi-billion dollar corp telling us they love Linux now. Alternatively, calling it something like Nix subsystem for Windows or maybe just LSW would also do the trick, this seems like a lame excuse.

It was more that he could have said "No" to them, where as in this case he cannot really say "no" (or "yes" for that matter).

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#475

Post by bartread »

aporetics wrote: post #455
mumblemumble wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Indeed. Perhaps Hanlon's Razor is a better parallel for this particular situation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

I've also heard it expressed as "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence".

Although in this case I'm not sure organisational incompetence is necessarily a good enough explanation given there are ex-Microsofters in the discussion suggesting that people would actively have been weighing up whether or not to screw over Keivan. (Obviously I have no idea how likely that is to be true either.)

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#476

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

arcticfox wrote: post #472
hoffs wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about competing, it's about naming

To me, context matters. 'AppGet' sounds like a friendly hat tip to the legendary apt-get, given that they don't compete. 'WinGet', a direct copy of 'AppGet', is not a friendly reference IMO.

And why is "WinGet" not also a reference to apt-get? I've never even heard of AppGet before this morning.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#477

Post by sergeykish »

hoytschermerhrn wrote: post #428
macspoofing wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Ah yes. The new Microsoft, same as the old Microsoft. I wouldn't say that. It's a big company thing.

Saying that it’s just “a big company thing” is giving Microsoft a pass here. Look at their recent PR: wanting to embrace the developer community [1], their love of open source [2], etc. While AppGet may be an isolated story, I’m inclined to believe that MSFT is simply acting they way they’ve always have — by embracing, by extending, and by extinguishing. 1. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/micro…

I agree there is a strong embrace here. And that's usually good. Another alternative is neglect.

Microsoft has unusual ability to move swiftly, with all its weight it may be not graceful. That said they do not always extend and extinguish. Often they make clone and ride it

Oracle => MSSQL

Java => C#

AWS => Azure

To make objective decision it would be nice to have a list of Microsoft inspirations with their fate and Microsoft actions.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#479

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

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.

Did Linus Torvalds "Sherlock" Bitkeeper by writing git? I also recall there wasn't much sympathy for Paragon Software (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22706172) when exFAT support was added to the Linux kernel, obsoleting their product.

This furor is a surprising flip-flop given the usual "information wants to be free" and "patents for software are dumb" cheerleading that we usually see around here.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#480

Post by alpb »

dustinmoris wrote: post #286
alpb wrote: post #91

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…

Nobody at Microsoft understands open source. The people who pretend to understand are just glorified sales people pretending to be developers promoting every new Microsoft product regardless how shit it is or how much better other competing products are (you know who these sales people are). Microsoft loves OSS as much as they are able to control it. They are like an abusive partner who "love you" for as long as they…

Disagree. Clearly you don’t work on OSS as your primary job and you don’t know enough teams/people at MSFT.
Post reply on HN