Sadly, this response by Microsoft doesn’t address anything. It reads more like an acknowledgment that what Keivan wrote was indeed the truth. It’s very much the type of non-apology that you’d see from politicians.
At the very least, I would expect a post mortem style explanation about what led to Keivan being ghosted and how they plan to not repeat the same thing from occurring. This isn’t the normal candidate interview pipeline after all.
>I want to take this opportunity to thank Keivan for his thoughtful approach to AppGet and working with us. 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.
Yeah, this feels very much like they're trying to spin what actually happened. All the more frustrating because the App-Get creator was incredibly understanding about everything. It wasn't the usual hn "[FAANG] stole our billion dollar idea and made it free" thing. From what I saw, he was actually quite happy that MS finally had a proper official package manager. He genuinely just wanted to have been involved in the discussion and credited for the obvious use of his ideas even though they clearly brain-raped him.
If this is their idea of giving him credit, I would think they should tell the story the way it really happened and apologize for their behavior. If they're not going to do that, they probably shouldn't even mention it because it's truly distracting me from learning about the merits of WinGet.
Sadly I expect their legal counsel was involved. It reads like something that, while acknowledging they took “some” inspiration from Keivan’s work, avoids stating any detail about what that was. Note also how they carefully avoid mentioning anything related to the job interview, the most “sue-able” of subjects.
I’m not mad anymore, it’s just bittersweet: Keivan finally gets some kudos, but yet again the giant corporation cannot stop itself from looking utterly soulless.
It does give me an ambivalent feeling I'd like a word for:
It's when someone/something you consider evil commits another wrong and it comes to light. You hate to see it happen and feel for the victims, but as a result more people also come to distrust them. I guess it's similar to "I told you so", but not smug and with less conclusion.
I won't give Microsoft a single chance until they let you make a local account on W10 without walking out of the range of the wifi you accidentally taught it the password to. It really needs to be opt-in, but I'd settle for the opt-out being plainly accessible.
(On a tangential note Apple needs to stop nagging to enable Siri if it hasn't already. Not anywhere near as bad but still dumb.)
/rant
I do feel that they really didn't need to fuck this up so badly. Just apologize properly and give the man some big fat credit, maybe with a notice in the CLI. Only developers use this, they'd love to see Microsoft properly attributing the idea.
I'm going to migrate my github accounts this first week of June as a small protest.
So he just straight up admitted that AppGet and the discussions with Keivan directly influenced the direction of Microsoft's package manager. What a dick move.
Except that he’s not happy with the response?[1] If you read through the entire discussion, you’ll see that he hasn’t been happy with their response.[2] So I’m not sure where you are getting this sentiment from.
Note: he hasn’t made an update since the blog went up, so this comment may eventually become out of date.
I still do not understand the drama? As far as I can tell the story is as follows. AppGet is Open Source using Apache 2.0 license.
Microsoft wanted to work together with the creator of AppGet - It did not work out.
Microsoft releases WinGet as Open Source (MIT), AppGet creator ends his project.
Of course it would have been cooler if they would have just forked the project, or became maintainers of AppGet - but that did not work out - so they created their own. People did not get together and voila now we have two different linux variants.
Isn't this the normal lifecycle of OpenSource? Many variants of the same thing competing with eachother?
If I create my own linux variant and somebody else releases a similar linux with the same features, (but has more funding and capacity to continue maintenance) there is no point in me continuing support for my personal linux variant?
Isn't this just a variant of the core problem of open source how projects get their funding /compensation?
> Microsoft wanted to work together with the creator of AppGet - It did not work out
There’s a lot of nuance that gets lost with a euphemism of “it did not work out”.
The drama largely comes down to behaviour that looks and smells a lot like trying to rinse free consultancy from a developer under the guise of recruiting, before ghosting him for months.
This blog post is like a second punch in the balls.
1. We acknoledge that what Keivan wrote ist true, but we will not take any responsibility for our own actions
2. We publish Winget on GitHub, so Keivan can devote his free and unpaid time to help us make it better lolz
3. We don't fail to link to Winget, but when we try to acknoledge Keivan's efforts and AppGet which massively inspired Winget, we can't even put a single link to his blog or github repo.
Why bother even write this blog post in the first place? What was this supposed to do?
14 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 41.6 ms ] threadSadly, this response by Microsoft doesn’t address anything. It reads more like an acknowledgment that what Keivan wrote was indeed the truth. It’s very much the type of non-apology that you’d see from politicians.
At the very least, I would expect a post mortem style explanation about what led to Keivan being ghosted and how they plan to not repeat the same thing from occurring. This isn’t the normal candidate interview pipeline after all.
Yeah, this feels very much like they're trying to spin what actually happened. All the more frustrating because the App-Get creator was incredibly understanding about everything. It wasn't the usual hn "[FAANG] stole our billion dollar idea and made it free" thing. From what I saw, he was actually quite happy that MS finally had a proper official package manager. He genuinely just wanted to have been involved in the discussion and credited for the obvious use of his ideas even though they clearly brain-raped him.
If this is their idea of giving him credit, I would think they should tell the story the way it really happened and apologize for their behavior. If they're not going to do that, they probably shouldn't even mention it because it's truly distracting me from learning about the merits of WinGet.
I’m not mad anymore, it’s just bittersweet: Keivan finally gets some kudos, but yet again the giant corporation cannot stop itself from looking utterly soulless.
It does give me an ambivalent feeling I'd like a word for:
It's when someone/something you consider evil commits another wrong and it comes to light. You hate to see it happen and feel for the victims, but as a result more people also come to distrust them. I guess it's similar to "I told you so", but not smug and with less conclusion.
I won't give Microsoft a single chance until they let you make a local account on W10 without walking out of the range of the wifi you accidentally taught it the password to. It really needs to be opt-in, but I'd settle for the opt-out being plainly accessible.
(On a tangential note Apple needs to stop nagging to enable Siri if it hasn't already. Not anywhere near as bad but still dumb.)
/rant
I do feel that they really didn't need to fuck this up so badly. Just apologize properly and give the man some big fat credit, maybe with a notice in the CLI. Only developers use this, they'd love to see Microsoft properly attributing the idea.
I'm going to migrate my github accounts this first week of June as a small protest.
Note: he hasn’t made an update since the blog went up, so this comment may eventually become out of date.
[1] https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/issues/353#issuecomm...
[2] https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/issues/353#issuecomm...
[1] https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/issues/353#issuecomm...
Microsoft wanted to work together with the creator of AppGet - It did not work out. Microsoft releases WinGet as Open Source (MIT), AppGet creator ends his project.
Of course it would have been cooler if they would have just forked the project, or became maintainers of AppGet - but that did not work out - so they created their own. People did not get together and voila now we have two different linux variants.
Isn't this the normal lifecycle of OpenSource? Many variants of the same thing competing with eachother?
If I create my own linux variant and somebody else releases a similar linux with the same features, (but has more funding and capacity to continue maintenance) there is no point in me continuing support for my personal linux variant?
Isn't this just a variant of the core problem of open source how projects get their funding /compensation?
There’s a lot of nuance that gets lost with a euphemism of “it did not work out”.
The drama largely comes down to behaviour that looks and smells a lot like trying to rinse free consultancy from a developer under the guise of recruiting, before ghosting him for months.
1. We acknoledge that what Keivan wrote ist true, but we will not take any responsibility for our own actions
2. We publish Winget on GitHub, so Keivan can devote his free and unpaid time to help us make it better lolz
3. We don't fail to link to Winget, but when we try to acknoledge Keivan's efforts and AppGet which massively inspired Winget, we can't even put a single link to his blog or github repo.
Why bother even write this blog post in the first place? What was this supposed to do?