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The Day AppGet Died

keivan.io

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Re: The Day AppGet Died

#561

Post by thePunisher »

lliamander wrote: post #514
thePunisher wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly that: you open-sourced it so it's your donation to the world. Don't be sour if someone copies your idea or makes a ton of money from it. And what would be the benefit if Microsoft gave you credit for it? Most likely their lawyers would reject it since you may then be able to sue them for...I don't know what, but money in any case. It's a very Microsoft-thing to do to copy someone else's idea and improve on it…

Virtually all open source licenses require at least the inclusion of the original copyright notice in all derivative works. Now, if the code itself were altered in superficial ways, but the structure and mechanism were essentially the same, it is kind of a grey area. Regardless of the legal case, the idea that concerns of reputation or credit are irrelevant to open source work is a crock. People may be working on ope…

The fact is Microsoft didn't copy anything except the idea, and you don't need attribution for that. Winget was rewritten entirely from scratch and there was no open-source involved.

I'm not even sure if the author's idea was original anyway. It looked more a CLI program to download and run installers.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#562

Post by svick »

generalk wrote: post #433
michaelt wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 there's a huge and obvious difference between an open-source dev naming a package manager for a non-Linux platform "AppGet" in reference/homage/whatever to apt-get; and Microsoft, a multi-billion dollar company, dangling a carrot in front of the developer of a program called AppGet then ghosting him, forking his open-source project and calling it WinGet, and not even having the decency to publicly credit his…

I believe they didn't actually fork his code, what they did is build a brand new project that is heavily inspired by AppGet.

Also, they have now corrected the credit: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/winget-install-le...

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#563

Post by svick »

bencollier49 wrote: post #549
lliamander wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What license did you release AppGet under? Almost every open source license at a very minimum requires that credit be given to the original authors. Arguably they are in a situation of legal liability (IANAL). You don't strike me as the kind of person that would litigate such things, but I would like to think that if the right people at Microsoft became aware of such a liability, they might choose to give you credit…

https://github.com/appget/appget/blob/master/LICENSE Apache 2.0 by the looks of things. Interesting question would be whether WinGet is a "derivative work" of AppGet.

> Interesting question would be whether WinGet is a "derivative work" of AppGet.

They don't share any code. As far as copyright law is concerned, it is not a derivative work.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#564

Post by svick »

battery423 wrote: post #298
outsomnia wrote: post #249

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.

You are a small Team in a big company. Your job is to create an App Manager. There is already a code base under a MIT license. You use it. I'm not seeing the issue.

> You use it.

They didn't use any of AppGet's code.

Though nobody is questioning whether what MS did was legal. The issue is whether it was moral.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#565

Post by svick »

VSerge wrote: post #275
waon wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not disagreeing with you, but I think it's better to make it a little bit more clear what exactly was copied. Reading the article mentioned in the OP, the main selling point for appget seems to be that the packages are written in yaml: > Do you want to know how Microsoft WinGet works? go read the article ( https://keivan.io/appget-what-chocolatey-wasnt/ ) But that alone doesn't particularly strike me as a completely…

MS not having the basic decency of reimbursing his travel expenses is also shocking, as well as incredibly petty. What a broken way of dealing with someone who dealt with MS in good faith and brought value to their ecosystem.

The article says there was an issue with reimbursement. It doesn't say that the issue wasn't resolved or that it was MS's fault, both are just your conjecture.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#566

Post by denni9th »

tw04 wrote: post #541
MatekCopatek wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cmon, I live in a country where there is a legal obligation to inform candidates whether they passed the interview. It's not a very high bar. We shouldn't be accepting this kind of behaviour - especially from someone as renowned as Microsoft. It would have been absolutely trivial for them to send a polite three sentence email when they made their decision. I mean, not to shoot the messenger, you're right, that's exac…

You obviously live in a country where people aren't sue happy. Half of the reason they don't respond when you fail an interview is because they don't want to open themselves up to legal liability if the first-year HR rep says something stupid when the person asks "but why?"

I think the best compromise is a polite email saying no, but any further "why" questions can be ignored to prevent legal liability.
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