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The Day AppGet Died

keivan.io

281–290 of 566 posts

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#281
post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, all I said is that getting the email is better than not getting it. Obviously his case was worse than mine, the one just reminded me of the other - partly the lack of credit, and partly because the company in my case was owned by Microsoft.

Thanks for sharing. I actually wonder now if your experience happens fairly often, and Keivan's experience infrequently, though they're fairly similar circumstances. Integrating OSS or OSS concepts into a program vs a library have different implications but the engineering work required is the same. WinGet on paper, as a product, meets all of the requirements desired by the community. To appreciate the toll it takes…

Yeah, I think what we're talking about is surely the norm... Sending "hey we're releasing something built on your project" emails isn't in anyone's job description, after all. And there's no real upside, but the potential downside is that someone takes offense, tries to spoil your announcement, etc.

That said, in my case the summary makes it sound better than it actually was. The game they released was a one-off promo thing, which made a big splash for a few days but was effectively dead by the time I heard about it a week or two later. Then there followed a dialog with a separate team inside Microsoft, about hopefully updating it, which dragged on for a while and basically resulted in their bit getting updated but not mine, etc. etc. Altogether it was a big distraction and a pretty dreary episode.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#282
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would probably sting less if they didn't ghost him. Not giving the benefit of the doubt to Microsoft on this.

The big companies often end up ghosting the guys they don't want to hire. A long time ago, I was an intern and got fully ghosted by Nvidia. It was very annoying but my life probably worked out better for it.

There's a big difference between ghosting and sending a mail informing you that the process has stopped.

I realize I'm missing some context here, but I can't see how your life would work out better from _not_ receiving a heads up that the process has ended.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#283

After reading the second e-mail it is clear that they are trying to do something "official" and that their interest in the specific person is low (to say it mildly). Full of "going-forward" and similar corporate-speak. DANGER DANGER DANGER: when someone loses natural language, he is no longer speaking for himself. What a pitiful world we live in.

I wish someone would write a serious corporate-speak dictionary, list the most used phrases and what they usually mean, explain different levels of formality etc.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#284

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".

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…

>a year from now nobody will care

I suspect a week from now, 99% of people who read this will have forgotten about it.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#285
This is the reason I'm hesitant to open source an idea I have to build as a SaaS. I'm a big proponent of self-hosting, so I'd like to offer my SaaS for self-hosting to anyone that wants to. There is always a risk of might come around, think "oh, that's neat!", and away they are with a marketing budget miles higher than mine.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#286
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 control every step of your life but as soon as you step aside they'll grab a hammer and smash you in the face.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not claiming that his approach was "completely novel". He's claiming microsoft identified his way, that already existed, was the way they wanted to go, toyed with bringing him in to run it and then got overwhelmed by internal Not Invented Here / We Can Do It Better and threw him under the bus. It's literally the new cuddly microsoft Embracing, Extending and Extinguishing this guy's work.

What new cuddly Microsoft? When did they grow fur? Did people honesty believe that some messaging and branding choices would outweigh the influence of institutional inertia, for such a large company?

Yes. People honestly believe this.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#288
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…

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.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#289

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".

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 reasonable to still boycott them, makes more sense than getting annoyed at Microsoft in a situation like this (which is also deserved but more minor in the grand scheme of things).

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