Cross-posted from another thread that is now buried:[0]
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:
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/winget-install-le...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have a different reading of this. I think this is them doing the best they can within the limits set by microsoft's legal department. They cannot legally admit they looked at his code and copied the structure, because that opens them up to a copyright suit. In the blog post it seems they went as far as they could: admitting to being influenced by the ideas, without having actually copied any of the code.
If they really want to fix this, they need to pay AppGet's author some money, and get something in writing so they are legally protected from copyright suits. I assume they're negotiating this right now, and that once this deal is done there will be another blog post that is more genuine.
They really messed this up because it would have been cheap to get something in writing before releasing WinGet. Someone at microsoft legal dropped the ball.
I'm mean I know it would be nice to toss him some money. And it sucks when companies ghost people. But really isn't the point of open source that everyone can do what they want with the code? And if you're not distributing the actual code, why do you owe them anything?
If I gave credit to everyone who influenced the code I write, the file would be huge. Does the world have enough disk drives to hold all the credit where credit is due?
> why do you owe them anything?
decency, morals, thoughtfulness, that kind of thing
> If I gave credit to everyone who influenced the code I write...
They directly ripped it off.
Big companies will try not to pay even when they have money. To not even give the minimum of non-monetary credit is even less reason for me ever to release code under a "what's mine is yours licence".
No, they used some very common and unoriginal ideas that were implemented in AppGet.
Can you point out exactly what was "ripped off" here?
- https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli
- https://github.com/appget/appget
They're not even written in the same language. And everything done in AppGet has been done before. Yawn
> Big companies will try not to pay even when they have money.
I will try not to pay, even when I have money. I think this applies to most people. Who wants to pays for something that's already free? I'm not running a fuckin charity over here.
> To not even give the minimum of non-monetary credit...
They've given it.
However, I wonder if during all of this Keivan has credited Microsoft for all of the open source tools, services and frameworks that he's used in his other work???