Microsoft copied new Windows Package Manager from rival AppGet, claims developer | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft copied new Windows Package Manager from rival AppGet, claims developer

theverge.com

98 pointsdataflow32 comments

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.

Wow, yeah, that blog post doesn't really address the concerns here. The focus is all on "helping Microsoft build WinGet" and they're just admitting that they used Keivan's ideas without so much as an apology for leading him on and ghosting him. This has been some totally unprofessional behavior from Microsoft, and it shows that they see the open source community as free development resources that they're free to just lift the best ideas from without properly consulting the developers.

> 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.

AppGet is a fairly unoriginal open source product. Anyone can fork it and do what they want with it. Furthermore, if one doesn't copy code directly and simply uses a similar idea, the author of AppGet doesn't even have to be credited.

Did the author of Preact get flack like this for copying React? How about the authors of any other number of forks of other OSS products?

And just because you get interviewed doesn't mean you get the job. Everybody who has gone through rounds of interviews with large tech companies knows this.

People that share your opinion are thinking as if Microsoft is one person. HN largely subscribe to "cock-up before conspiracy" or Hanlon's Razor. So, why don't you explain to us how you think this Microsoft conspiracy went down? Do you really think people sat around a table discussing how to screw this one dev and steal his product that was already open source??

Please... some people from MS interviewed him, some other people from MS decided against hiring him and maybe some other people from MS used some ideas (some very common and not-original ideas) from his work. Big deal. Microsoft has ~150,000 employees.

> but the moral high ground [has been lost].

No it hasn't. Not even in the slightest degree IMO.

> and lots of dev goodwill has been lost.

Not sure how you're measuring that but people who read HN and r/programming are in the low percentage out of all devs worldwide. And out of those people that read about it - well you can see here that we don't all agree.

I mean even after the last 2 decades of Linux dominance and Mac desktop OSes - among other stats, Windows is still the number one desktop OS used by software developers according to the recent StackOverflow survey and C# is still one of the most popular languages and people are still using VSCode, TypeScript, GitHub, etc. The great majority of people generally don't even stop and think about things like privacy, security or the morality of big companies.

But there is no question of morality here anyway. I question the morality of Andrew for sharing his work and then acting like it's a crime to look at the shared work.

Finally, someone with a sensible opinion on this situation, other than the routine "read headline" write a bashful comment attacking large corporation without understanding the core issue (which obviously is getting mob downvoted without actually attempting to understand the scope of the issue). And as a matter of fact, manifests have been used by other package managers before, so since when did Kevian have a monopoly over this idea? It is remarkable how this has blown up and one-sided the narrative has been. MSFT, probably due to confidentiality, cannot divulge the outcome of the interview. Perhaps, he was extremely hard to communicate with in person with very strong views that don't mesh well in a MSFT team environment? Who knows, but just blindly listening the Kevian is disingenuous at most and dangerous.

When I read the author's initial blog post a few days ago, this part immediately stood out to me:

> I was told that the acqui-hire process through BizDev would take a very long time. An alternative to speed up the process would be just to hire me with a “bonus” and then work on migrating the code ownership after the fact. I didn’t have any objections, so we scheduled some meetings/interviews in Redmond.

As someone who has worked in the acquisition/acquihire area, this immediately raises so many red flags. The team responsible for shipping the package manager obviously did not have the budget/exec sponsorship to purchase a rival. Not sure if security, legal, HR etc were even involved at all at that point, or had budgeted the time to assist with this.

Yes the acquisition process takes a long time, and that is exactly to avoid situations like this one. The only correct response when a company reaches out to you for something like this is "cool, let me set up a meeting with my lawyer."

I read the same blog post, and I think he knows he screwed up. I don't remember if it was explicit, but that's the tone I remember. I still think it was slimy what MS did.

I'm confused, in what way did he screw up? It seems like he went along with Microsoft's alternative despite the red flags and Microsoft still didn't treat him well. Are you saying if he'd refused and waited, he'd have gotten treated better? How exactly did he make this worse?

I re-read it and I'm wrong. I thought he said he was too trusting of their motives, or some such, but he didn't.

>The only correct response when a company reaches out to you for something like this is "cool, let me set up a meeting with my lawyer."

Or alternatively, choose not to respond at all as per PG's January 2015 essay "Don't Talk to Corporate Dev" [0]

>Distractions are the thing you can least afford in a startup. And conversations with corp dev are the worst sort of distraction, because as well as consuming your attention they undermine your morale. One of the tricks to surviving a grueling process is not to stop and think how tired you are. Instead you get into a sort of flow. Imagine what it would do to you if at mile 20 of a marathon, someone ran up beside you and said "You must feel really tired. Would you like to stop and take a rest?" Conversations with corp dev are like that but worse, because the suggestion of stopping gets combined in your mind with the imaginary high price you think they'll offer.

Being PG, he's focussed on startups, but it applies to any small business that might be the target of an acqui-hire.

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/corpdev.html

This is gold:

I remember once complaining to a friend at Google about some nasty trick their corp dev people had pulled on a YC startup.

"What happened to Don't be Evil?" I asked.

"I don't think corp dev got the memo," he replied.

I definitely agree he should have been credited more, and the communications strategy was cruel.

But he released his work, AppGet, under an Apache 2.0 license. Microsoft was free to copy it as long as they followed the terms of the license. That's one of the points of open source.

Microsoft also released their copy of it under the very open MIT license.

The article treats it like a crime, but this is essentially how it should work, right? One open-source project greatly advances the art, and another takes what was created and released freely, and runs with it.

If they literally copied code from AppGet, they may have an issue given that they didn't follow the Apache license terms precisely (at least, it doesn't look like it from a very brief glance at the WinGet repository -- Beigi's name doesn't appear to be in the Apache license notices). But that seems easily fixable.

I'm guessing you haven't read his post on this, because he's indeed not upset about the copying, but about the credit: https://keivan.io/the-day-appget-died/

I actually had read his post. He's very justifiably upset about the lack of credit for AppGet and also the terrible communication, which I mentioned. I thought it was a well-written post.

But the linked Verge article frames it in terms of the copying being the problem, rather than the credit, even calling it Sherlocking. It's not.

I don't think it does? They mention "credit" at least 4 times in the article ("copy" comes up 3 times) and they're very clear that the issue is credit ("The announcement was especially bad given how little credit was given", "Beigi is mostly unhappy with how Microsoft didn’t credit him for his work", etc.). I'm not sure how you read it to imply the crime is in the copying?

Credit for what? They didn't copy his code - they used the same very unoriginal ideas that AppGet used.

It looks like MS doesn't copy the source code but they uses a bit similar yaml format.

I also agree he should credited more.

https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli https://github.com/appget/appget

https://github.com/microsoft/winget-pkgs/blob/master/manifes... https://github.com/appget/appget.packages/blob/master/manife...

He wrote many things, but in the end it's unclear what he didn't like.

Microsoft didn’t copy app get and that’s part of the problem. Had they made a fork then credit would be clear.

This came up recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23331287

There are a lot of people from Microsoft on HN. Hopefully at least one of them will respond here, or even better, look into righting this wrong.

To be honest I think they're probably here, reading this, feeling bad about it, realising there's little they can do, so not saying anything.

Microsoft wrote the post acknowledging the copying, they know it was handled badly ... what else could they do at this point?

I hope their investigation finds out what went wrong. I might suspect it was:

- averro being their usual rubbish selves and ghosting candidates. Microsoft needs to massively improve their hiring processes.

- Clinick realising that the WinGet announcement should have credited AppGet.

Been happening forever. When OS/2 was invented we met with them, talked about licensing some of their tech. Showed them our stuff including our 'Context Manager', an app that let a microcomputer manage several apps at once.

Fast forward 6 months - OS/2 had a Context Manager, looked and worked identically to ours. Sigh. What can you do? Good ideas are not patentable.

Hearing this, I vow to never use OS/2.

don't forget Microsoft like other organizations, are just a bunch of people, except that they have many more "bunches" than an average company.

The way I look at it this is just the acts of a few people and has nothing to do with overall movement of the entire company

> has nothing to do with overall movement of the entire company

What are we but the sum of our parts, MS hasn't changed.

They just have more projects that are now in the "Embrace" stage

Organisations have a culture that flows down from the top.

> The way I look at it this is just the acts of a few people and has nothing to do with overall movement of the entire company

True, but a company is nothing but the people they hire.

It therefore reflects poorly on Microsoft as a whole and will make people think twice about working for/with Microsoft in future.

Never be a 'good' person when interacting with a corperation because even if the people you meet at this corpoation seem like nice humans they can not act as such. Even now after all this the dev decides not to carry on developing appget as it might result in fragmentation of the windows software ecosystem. So this guy is ACTUALLY making good long term decisions that help Microsoft. And then Microsoft release a statement saying "oh sorry - what did we do? we never meant to, we care, we reeaaaly do".

I don't know why this is acceptable. People need to realise that their first obligation is to be a good human, even if you are working for Microsoft.

Since when is using manifests a revolutionary idea? It's been used over a year in Julia for package management. IMO this whole thing blew out and feels like an unjustified mob mentality to attack MSFT over some trivial technology borrow. It also feels like we are not getting the full story, only Keivan's side, who is obviously trying to steer the narrative in one direction. For example, what actually happened in the interview?

Embrace, copy, extinguish?

Changing culture takes longer than making PR. sigh..

Can you stop people from doing this ? From what I am aware even MIT license still needs to be credited somewhere in the new project.

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