> 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.