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The Day AppGet Died

keivan.io

551–560 of 566 posts

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not even American. I can easily imagine it happening in any large company. This "Andrew" is isolated from everything by multiple levels of bureaucracy and regulations. Even if he wanted to make right, he would've just burned his accumulated clout it vain. Hire as a contractor? No matching position. Write a check? No such budget line item. Give a shout-out? Leave marketing to the marketing dept.

Exactly. He couldn't even give a line item credit because Legal would step in with a barrage of concerns compelling management to remove it.

None of these explainations for how this reprehensible behavior came to pass, suggest to me that it's unfair or unreasonable to call it, and the entities who do it, reprehensible.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

It seems. It looks like very few HN posters compares actual source code or even open GitHub (C# / C++).

Not really a surprise. It's trendy to bash on certain companies, much less to fact check!

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#553
post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> In this case the author claims he could have obtained a patent and that code was copied. No. From the source: > the core mechanics, terminology, the manifest format and structure, even the package repository’s folder structure, are very inspired by AppGet. In the update it's slightly more vague, but there's no claim of coffee being copied there either: > Code being copied isn't an issue. I knew full well what it me…

In the update and the responses/interviews the author gave he clearly states that Microsoft copied his source, an absurd claim considering both repos are public.

He goes to say that "If I were the patenting type, this would be the thing you would patent. ps. I don't regret not patenting anything."

I mean come on. Every package has a .yaml manifest where there's a download link for every architecture, a hash, a version and an installation recipe. There's nothing to patent here. It would be extremely hard to argue there's no prior art, considering most languages and distributions have been shipping with package managers built just like these for years. Even my text editor has one!

Realistically, the author managed to get a lot of attention for his other startup for almost no cost. By bashing the company that's trendy to bash right now.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#554

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.

You point is that this is simple, yet Microsoft with Thousands of engineers working over the span of decades never internally developed this idea or framework except after picking the brain of this particular person and doing a copy of that particular competing project.

Paintings are just paint on a canvas, and all code is just clicks on a keyboard. That doesn’t make it any less immoral to blatantly copy without recognition.

It’s perfectly fine to carry out a fork, the irony here is that Microsoft likely tried you play this angle of “we’re just competing, not copying you” because they thought carrying out a fork with attribution would blow up in their face, which this now has.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You point is that this is simple, yet Microsoft with Thousands of engineers working over the span of decades never internally developed this idea or framework except after picking the brain of this particular person and doing a copy of that particular competing project. Paintings are just paint on a canvas, and all code is just clicks on a keyboard. That doesn’t make it any less immoral to blatantly copy without reco…

> yet Microsoft with Thousands of engineers working over the span of decades never internally developed this idea

Ever heard of NuGet[0]? Been around since 2010.

WinGet isn't a fork of AppGet, the codebases share nothing.

[0] https://www.nuget.org/

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#556
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Linus is adamantly against that clause. oh i didnt know he was adamant against the clause - i thought that he didn't want to force it upon the many existing users of linux.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU He also has refused to release any of his projects under GPLv3 (or even “v2 or later”).

Which is too bad because CDDL is compatible with GPLv3 thus that would make integration of ZFS possible

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. He couldn't even give a line item credit because Legal would step in with a barrage of concerns compelling management to remove it.

None of these explainations for how this reprehensible behavior came to pass, suggest to me that it's unfair or unreasonable to call it, and the entities who do it, reprehensible.

Exactly. It's not like people in those companies get nothing done. E.g., Microsoft got the product out the door. So any apparent incompetence at treating humans humanely is a choice.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#558
post #288

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.

Looking at the source: Appget is licensed under Apache-2.0 https://github.com/appget/appget/blob/master/LICENSE

I wonder if things would have been different, if the product was licensed under Gplv3. If so, he could demand to check if Microsoft violated the license https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-violation.en.html (to check if this is a completely new rewrite for example).

Update: Ah looks like Winget was sourced in C++, and Appget is in C#

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? From the way you were talking about Sonarr, I expected it to be something more than... a bittorrent organizer. It has nearly 6k stars on github and seems wildly popular. Why would that be taken as anything but a strong "hire this person" signal? I mean, I believe that it's possible you're correct. But this is just such a foreign "does not compute" situation to me. Is the thought process something like "Sonarr is…

Pretty easy to understand if you understand how risk-averse big corporations are, and how the image of BitTorrent has been forever polluted by "but, it's copyright infringement!". Anything mentioning or using BitTorrent is scary for these huge companies, because it's associated with piracy. Sure, your deploy times to your container fleet can be 70% faster, but if you're using BitTorrent, it'll be very hard to push th…

Guys, the usual "but BitTorrent can be used for so many legitimate purposes!" fig leaf argument doesn't work here. Sonarr isn't for downloading Linux ISOs. The only thing it does is schedule downloads of TV shows as soon as they air. You can't even use the "but my library is only composed of DVDs I purchased and ripped myself" excuse here. Sonarr only makes sense in the context of automated downloading of stuff that's on thetvdb.com (which is 99.99% copyrighted material).

You may or may not think that's a fine thing to do, but it is the only thing you can pretend Sonarr is for.

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