Cross-posted from another thread that is now buried:[0]<p>The "Andrew" in question who courted Keivan (AppGet's dev) is Andrew Clinick. He wrote a blog post in response to this a few days ago:<p><a href="https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/winget-install-learning/" rel="nofollow">https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/winget-install-le...</a><p>Still seems pretty tone-deaf to me - obviously MS seems to be in the legal clear, but the moral high ground and lots of dev goodwill has been lost.<p>It also damages the ability for devs to informally meet and chat with PMs at larger companies everywhere - adds a lot of mistrust to the eco-system.<p>This is not that MS came up with their own package manager. It's the entire song-and-dance routine that was conducted about potentially hiring Keivan, and then ghosting the engineer whose open-source product you were simultaneously cloning.<p>Of course, people will forget, but many will still remember. This is still a net-negative all-around when it didn't need to be.<p><i></i> Edit, this ZDNet article adds no new information and nothing has changed since the other articles have come out, but I guess it's good that more places are covering it to signal boost this properly.<p>[0]<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23375624" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23375624</a>
'He went for an interview at Microsoft's Redmond headquarters in December, which apparently "went well", but Andrew didn't inform him he would not get the job at Microsoft until six months later – on the day before the WinGet preview would be unveiled at Build 2020. '<p>This is bullshit. Keep him quiet with the hope of a job (embrace) until they release their version (extend, extinguish). Changing CEOs doesn't change everyone who works there.
For me the worst thing about this entire fiasco is really Microsoft's brazen unapologetic predator behaviour.<p>They've invited Keivan to their headquarters with a bait, giving him the wrong impression that they wanted to help him with the project when really they wanted to extract valuable information from his experience. He's been working on AppGet for a while, ran into issues, thought about problems which users are having, dealt with certain challenges and iterated until he got to a certain understanding/vision of his product. This is all very very valuable information not published anywhere in an open source thoughts database. It's just the experience and knowledge that only lives in Keivan's head and Microsoft knew that they had to bait him with some false promises and hopes in order to get access to that information which he might otherwise not have shared with a competitor. Also they didn't forget about Keivan. They knew what they were doing. At the beginning of the process someone put in their calendar to contact him the day before BUILD 2020 to send him this email, which is why he got the email the day before the announcement of WinGet. This was no coincidence.<p>That is fraud in my opinion. Who cares about his source code, they stole much more valuable stuff from him. Anyone who doesn't see that is ignorant or blind.<p>Keivan should take legal action.
This seems more in the realm of poorly managed expectations and less intentional and malicious copying. After reading his original blog post[0] I felt like they were originally interested in acquiring his software, but decided to go in a different direction with it and just weren't transparent about that decision at the time. It's not like they had to talk to him, the code is literally open sourced.<p>There's definitely things to gain from talking to the author of the project, but seems a bit reaching to suggest they wouldn't have been able to do what they did without talking to him. And it seems like a particularly pessimistic read to assume they were just lying to him outright to pull from his experience. Very little to gain from being a shark in this scenario, tons to (potentially) gain from acquiring an existing package manager. Gotta follow the incentives.<p>It's also worth mentioning that he mentioned the name similarity in his post in this way:<p>> When I showed it to my wife, the first thing she said was, “They Called it WinGet? are you serious!?” I didn’t even have to explain to her how the core mechanics, terminology, the manifest format and structure, even the package repository’s folder structure, are very inspired by AppGet.<p>He did not go on to mention that his own name was (nearly certainly) inspired by apt-get (stylized as AptGet on Ubuntu[1]). Implying he was the originator of the name [X]Get for a package manager seems aggressively dishonest, to the point that it throws his entire side of the argument into question for me.<p>I haven't looked thoroughly into the code, but this feels like someone who was expecting something to come out of his hard work and is (understandably) bummed it will now likely amount to nothing. I have trouble putting much blame on Microsoft for that.<p>[0]<a href="https://keivan.io/the-day-appget-died/" rel="nofollow">https://keivan.io/the-day-appget-died/</a><p>[1]<a href="https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AptGet" rel="nofollow">https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AptGet</a>
I am curious: why would I want to use AppGet or WinGet instead of Chocolatey?<p>And is the assertion that Microsoft took code from AppGet as part of WinGet? The fact that the word "copied" is in quotes makes me wonder what the beef is... and did anyone ask the APT team if they feel ripped off by the existence of Windows package managers?
Actual link to the statement: <a href="https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/winget-install-learning/" rel="nofollow">https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/winget-install-le...</a>
"We will be open sourcing our service code into our our WinGet repository on GitHub so that we can work together with Keivan and others to enable a better WinGet repository listing service."<p>People who decide to "work together" should carefully read and understand the terms under which they're doing so:<p><a href="https://opensource.microsoft.com/pdf/microsoft-contribution-license-agreement.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://opensource.microsoft.com/pdf/microsoft-contribution-...</a>
Maybe I'm old school, but I think an apology should use the word apologize in it.<p>This is a "thank you", not an apology. But, at least it is better that what they did last week.
It's unfortunate to hear all of this from Beige's perspective. But the optimist in me thinks this is probably just a big company focusing on a release and putting everything else on the back-burner. That doesn't make it right, but I want to think this isn't an example of how Microsoft wants to treat the community moving forward. I think AppGet, an officially supported package manager, <i>should</i> be a core feature. It needed to happen one way or another.<p>But the lack of UI to browse/search I think is too lacking so I put this up a few days ago: <a href="https://wingetit.com" rel="nofollow">https://wingetit.com</a> -- I imagine Microsoft is going to copy/replace this soon, but I won't mind.
Original source was posted to HN a few days ago:<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23367153" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23367153</a><p>It likely got no views because the title is worded in such a way as to avoid the actual topic at hand. Given how it's written, my gut is that it was titled to avoid being picked up, so I'm glad a news source caught wind and is calling them out with an appropriate title.
There message sounds like a clear apology, unless the poster is hoping to hear the actual words "I'm sorry". They screw uped and came clean, even though like in most cases takes trending on Hacker News to get that resolution.
Is there a way to protest this?<p>Perhaps devs should upload every package with a readme that includes a reminder for developers, something like:<p>"This package is dedicated to Keivan Beigi. Read more about what Microsoft did to Kevin here: thankyoukevin.com"<p>Any better ideas?
Based on what I read, I'm guessing Andrew initially thought Keivan was someone worth working with because of AppGet. But then something during the interview started rubbing Andrew the wrong way. Maybe it was the way Keivan talked or how he dressed. So he started ghosting Keivan and things got more awkward. Maybe this worked for Andrew in the office, but that's not how things work between a company and its community.
This is nuts. Why not send the guy a $10-50K check (or to a nonprofit of his choosing) as a bounty/thank-you/we-love-open-spource-PR thing?<p>It would be one thing if there were trying to to hide it with closed source, but this was stupidly evil out in the open.
License is Apache 2.0 which does not require acknowledgment. I’m always surprised when open source project creators are complaining about a legal move made by a company related to their project: they allowed it in the first place. If they wanted more, like citation or financial advantage, they had the choice to force interested parties to comply by choosing another license. Betting on companies goodwill is risky...