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The Day AppGet Died

keivan.io

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Re: The Day AppGet Died

#521

Post by wpietri »

GordonS wrote: post #505
wpietri wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are many companies terrible? Sure. Is that an accident? No. However, Microsoft specifically has a history of being aggressively terrible in exactly this way, which is what I was referring to. For example, the time they talked with a company about an acquisition only to ghost them and totally steal their work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics#Microsoft_law...

They also have a more recent history of not behaving this way, and of winning back a lot of trust. This plainly isn't helping them now, but I do agree with the GP - this isn't a "Microsoft thing"

Sure. But let's consider why we saw a change for a while. In their heart of hearts did they reform? Did they really see the error of their ways and vow never to misuse their market power again? Many people seem to think so.

I think the simpler explanation is that US v Microsoft and other anti-trust action combined with their declining fortunes scared them for a while, causing them to perform goodness. But now that the heat's off and they're on the upswing, they're returning to old patterns.

We'll see which explanation fits better over time. But it was all of two days ago that the Slack CEO, not given to hyperbole, said that Microsoft is "unhealthily preoccupied with killing us": https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/26/21270421/slack-ceo-stewar...

So I don't think my view is unreasonable.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#523

Post by GordonS »

wpietri wrote: post #521
GordonS wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also have a more recent history of not behaving this way, and of winning back a lot of trust. This plainly isn't helping them now, but I do agree with the GP - this isn't a "Microsoft thing"

Sure. But let's consider why we saw a change for a while. In their heart of hearts did they reform? Did they really see the error of their ways and vow never to misuse their market power again? Many people seem to think so. I think the simpler explanation is that US v Microsoft and other anti-trust action combined with their declining fortunes scared them for a while, causing them to perform goodness. But now that th…

I think the reason for the change was 2 things.

Firstly, with the shift to the cloud, cross-platform was inevitably going to become more important - Linux is much loved in the server space.

Secondly, they realised the importance of developers in the shift to the cloud - their cloud, Azure, and also their DevOps tooling, Azure DevOps (and later Github).

Do I think their positive moves were altruistic? No, of course not - they are a corporation, a public one at that, and ultimately must generate money for their stakeholders.

But that doesn't mean their positive moves can't benefit me, or the development community, at the same time.

Honestly, the embrace & extinguish thing became a tired meme long ago; Microsoft are not somehow special in occasionally fucking someone over - every large corporation does this. It doesn't excuse it, of course, but the point is it's not a "Microsoft thing", and it doesn't invalidate all the goodwill they have generated in the past decade or so.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#524

Post by astn-austin »

As far as being offended that they called it WinGet when you had a package manager called AppGet.

MS already had a "package manager" called OneGet. They also have a package manager called NuGet.

I don't see any issue with MS replacing OneGet with WinGet.

Or why the name WinGet offends AppGet, or AptGet, or OneGet, or NuGet, etc.

I think [name]Get is pretty common.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#525

Post by 908B64B197 »

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…

Several things don't add up here.

> Code being copied isn't an issue.

I looked at both repos and they share no code at all.

In his article, the author claims that " If I were the patenting type, this would be the thing you would patent. ps. I don't regret not patenting anything."

That's really not how patents work, and looking at the repo, a second year CS student could do the same really. I don't see anything that could remotely be patented. It reads where to find the installer from a config file and determine what to do based on an enum.

Throughout the article the author uses the term acqui-hire but it seems Microsoft was simply considering him for a PM position (and he failed the interview). There's nothing to acquire since there's no patent, no IP and no brand. Only a registered domain and what seems like an anemic userbase, if any.

Being featured in The Verge[0] and on HN's front page will probably bring a lot more eyeballs to the startups he's trying to promote. So congratulation for the free advertising!

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/28/21272964/microsoft-winget...

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#526

Post by macspoofing »

servilio wrote: post #510
macspoofing wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 progra…

Though I agree that this is not an example of EEE, it is still very similar to behaviour from the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics#Microsoft_law...

Kind of. The difference is that AppGet is open source with no patents - so what they did was legal and, you might say, within ethical boundaries (except for the way they treated Keivan by stringing him along and then ghosting him) - though I could be persuaded that it isn't ethical for a trillion-dollar company to simply copy an existing open-source project, without some sort of voluntary compensation.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#527

Post by 908B64B197 »

chx wrote: post #260
akdor1154 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am interested (and kind of depressed) to think - is there actually a legally defensible upper hand that exists here?

If WinGet contains AppGet code and they didn't credit him then yes, absolutely, moral rights in copyright (attribution, right of association, integrity) cannot be transferred during the lifetime of the owner and yes MSFT can be sued for breaching them. It is extremely likely the penalties meted out by a judge wouldn't cover the costs of a lawyer. Not that anything like this would ever see a courtroom, MS will offer a…

In this case the author claims he could have obtained a patent and that code was copied.

Both of these claims are pretty easy to dismiss by simply looking at the respective repositories. They share nothing.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#528

Post by 908B64B197 »

divbzero wrote: post #246
scotty79 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

Yes. Microsoft really dropped the ball on this one. So much of what Microsoft has been doing — GitHub, .NET Core, NPM, Visual Studio Code, Windows Subsystem for Linux, etc. — has been to build goodwill with “developers! developers! developers!” Taking the resources to do an acquihire (or hire + bonus) right is small relative to the PR hit.

There was little to nothing to acquire. And judging from the radio silence post interview, the author didn't meet the bar for hiring.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#529

Post by 908B64B197 »

tannerbrockwell wrote: post #23

Microsoft pretends to want to acquire a product or software and then release their own implementation. The developer was obviously brain-picked for any implementation ideas, as stated at scale. They should have been paying a retainer, or had an offer inside of two weeks. Let this be a warning for other developers.

The code basically takes a .yaml manifest, reads where to find the package and get the installation instructions from an enum. I don't think there was much brain-picking here.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#530

Post by _j7tr »

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…

100%

Microsoft doesn't let any open source build of VS Code access the VS Code Marketplace. Heavily reduces the benefit of VS Code being open source when you can't use any extension or service built for it without building it yourself.

https://github.com/cdr/code-server/blob/master/doc/FAQ.md#di...

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