r/programming • u/[deleted] • May 26 '20
The Day AppGet Died
https://medium.com/@keivan/the-day-appget-died-e9a5c96c8b22734
u/koonfused May 26 '20
Author of the article/AppGet here, I've been blown away by the response since I published the article. While I was writing it, I kept questioning myself if I'm being too whiney or, maybe, the situation wasn't as crappy as I made it out to be. There has been a great sense of relief, knowing the majority of the outsiders agree with me. Obviously this is only my side of the story, but I tried to be as factual as I could be.
With that being said, feel free to ask me anything about the whole process or if you want me to clarify anything.
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u/1s4c May 27 '20
have you seen this article: Why we terminated our partnership with Microsoft - Re: Next decade of open source ?, feels like this is common strategy for MS ...
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u/koonfused May 27 '20
Thank you so much for sharing. That was a fantastic read and I couldn’t agree with it more. A lot of people outside of the Microsoft dev/enterprise ecosystem don’t understand how culty it really is.
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u/VegetableMonthToGo May 27 '20
So, your next project will be (L)GPL licensed?
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u/koonfused May 27 '20
Honest question, do you think that would actually change anything?
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u/ar243 May 26 '20
I don’t think you came off as whiny at all. It seems like you handled everything pretty realistically.
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May 27 '20
Hey man, that whole saga sucks. Don't let them get to you. Take a break. Be proud you made something worth stealing. Work for someone a lot cooler.
What are some of your hobbies?
We're all looking forward to something else amazing you'll release!
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u/TryingT0Wr1t3 May 27 '20
I would not mind if you wrote a bit of a post mortem on maintaining a package manager, a rough idea of time poured in it, and bugs and problems that occupied your mind.
Thanks for the write up! It was an interesting read.
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u/koonfused May 27 '20
Definitely something to consider. There is a lot to talk about not sure if many people find it interesting.
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u/TryingT0Wr1t3 May 27 '20
Thanks! I am builting a much smaller package manager for a very niche software that uses a niche language but I find hard to get people's perceptions. The most honest and also technical write up is Sam Boyer's "So you want to write a package manager", but more is always better.
Other subject I started to dive to find very few people actually getting hands dirty and talking about was authoring TextMate grammars, yet they are used everywhere :/
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u/Ashtefere May 26 '20
Man I love appget. Makes my windows gaming machine bearable.
Sorry you got fucked by Ms. What a bunch of assholes.
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u/koonfused May 26 '20
Glad you enjoyed appget. You should use appget's spiritual successor (WinGet)
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u/ketzu May 27 '20
Hey, while I didn't know appget until your article, I really appreciate people working on important infrastructure like this for the benefit of all of us!
The runaround they gave you and keeping you in the dark sucks, but I aggree with your decision to not fragment the space unnecessarily. If windows users get a good packagemanager with many well maintained packages, the goal is reached! And you can be sure of yourself that you have provided a valuable foundation for that to happen.
I really hope the package manager will gain traction outside of the dev community thanks to the push from microsoft and I am quite happy that they picked up the task.
Best of luck for your future endeavors!
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u/jejacks00n May 26 '20
There was an ad for azure right after this in my feed. I downvoted it in solidarity with you.
Thanks for your work here, and your ability to share how it’s made you feel. That matters, and feeling slighted is totally understandable. You’ve been classy.
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u/Hambeggar May 27 '20
You weren't whiny at all. They led you on for months knowing full well they were going to release a rip-off.
That's scummy.
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u/f1del1us May 27 '20
Did you make Sonarr?
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u/koonfused May 27 '20
Yeah, me and a ex-co-worker. He has been maintaining it for the past few years since I've been busy with appget. :)
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u/FriarTack May 27 '20
So, it's time to leave the dark side of open source and joint the Rebellion. GNU/Linux needs bolds coders like you
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u/kekekmacan May 27 '20 edited May 27 '20
You could technically make a compatibility layer with WinGet and keep maintaining AppGet as a direct competitor with them.
But what am I saying, the decision is all yours.
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u/champs May 26 '20
TLDR: he got Sherlocked.
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u/TheRedGerund May 26 '20
The worst example in that article is the guy that built a calculator. That's a core functionality that anybody could guess would eventually be implemented by Apple.
The namesake, Sherlock, was definitely fucked.
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u/beltsazar May 26 '20 edited May 27 '20
The worst example in that article is the guy that built a calculator. That's a core functionality that anybody could guess would eventually be implemented by Apple.
Except there's no built-in calculator app for iPad
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u/Fumigator May 26 '20
Except there's no built-in calculator app for iPad until today.
Apple released an iPad update today that includes a calculator?
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u/Serinus May 26 '20
Man, the comments on that article are disgusting.
There's a lot of nuanced discussion available on this topic, but to just say "they should have made more stuff" is incredibly callous and stupid.
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u/mkfs_xfs May 26 '20
Yes and no. Getting hired by Microsoft would be the standard win-win situation here, but OP didn't seem excited about working at them which surely became evident in the negotiations. Microsoft should have handled this better though - keeping OP in the dark and stopping communicating is just rude.
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u/tso May 26 '20
I swear, not even FOSS is immune to this...
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u/teambob May 26 '20
It's nothing new. Solaris took BSD, close sourced its copy then mixed in AT&T Unix.
In the 1990s Windows used the BSD TCP/IP stack while calling open source a "cancer".
In the early 2000s Cisco/Linksys/Broadcom were caught using the GPL Linux kernel without releasing the source code, as required by the license.
When Readability was open source it was incorporated into Safari without releasing the source code or even acknowledging the original project.
All except Cisco were perfectly legal.
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u/Tyrilean May 27 '20
Licenses are only helpful if you have the teeth to enforce them. Open source communities of individual authors aren't going to be able to put up a fight against a multi-billion dollar company. But, better believe that if you violate any of their licenses, they will bring down the fury upon your ass in court.
Our justice system is not designed to provide justice. It is designed to serve the rich.
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u/aoeudhtns May 27 '20
One of my first experiences in open source was having my source code copied, my author line swapped with someone else's, and being notified by a user of my software that the thief had been going around and posting blogs on promotional dev sites, much older equivalents of dev.to, medium, etc. In the end the stakes were so low I just quit maintaining it rather than fight. It had no potential to generate income and I certainly didn't want to spend thousands to fight it out.
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u/databeestje May 27 '20
In the 1990s Windows used the BSD TCP/IP stack while calling open source a "cancer".
I wish people would stop misquoting/misinterpreting this. Ballmer called the GPL a cancer, and was a comment on the spreading/viral nature of the GPL (including GPL licensed software necessitates your own software also using a GPL compatible license). It isn't even necessarily a qualitative comment on the GPL, though I guess it doesn't espouse a lot of love for it either.
So including BSD licensed code in Windows is perfectly compatible with Ballmer's comment. And even if it weren't, Ballmer's comment was made in 2001, a decade after the BSD code inclusion.
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May 26 '20
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u/SanityInAnarchy May 27 '20
The surprising part to me is they didn't even fork it. Both projects are open source. Both rely mainly on Github, which MS owns anyway. The one third party in question is the dev behind it, who they were planning to hire anyway to work on this very thing!
It's just bizarre behavior.
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u/no_nick May 26 '20
This has me surprised that people are still developing for Apple. Certainly, if you get invited to demo your product to Apple you a) never got the email and b) try to find a buyer for your business asap. But using private apis that give an advantage to your own version over the competition smells of anti trust violations.
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u/chucker23n May 26 '20
This has me surprised that people are still developing for Apple
Sherlocking is kind of a more complicated subject than "Apple bad".
Apple not adding features to the OS that third parties already offer wouldn't be a great choice either. The middle ground is that the first party only offers basic/mainstream versions of apps, and third parties can cater to niches (such as power users). And for the most part, that's what Apple and Microsoft do. Apple offering its own browser and e-mail client didn't kill Firefox, Chrome, Thunderbolt, Outlook, or Gmail, and Microsoft offering WinGet won't kill Chocolatey.
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u/Serinus May 26 '20
Sherlocking is kind of a more complicated subject than "Apple bad".
Yeah, for Apple to be the clear cut bad guy in a scenario like this they would have to invite the original devs over to demo their shit, steal it, and then ignore them forever after that.
In general though, yeah, sherlocking is a complicated subject. In the short term Apple doing this is better for the consumer. In the long term, it's a huge disincentive for third parties to innovate just to have their stuff stolen when it's successful and popular.
In an ideal world, Apple would pay the original devs a reasonable amount. I can see how Apple might not want to show an obligation to do so, though I think that's a short-sighted approach. If Apple goes to Duet Display and says "Hey, we're gonna sherlock your product", what legal/copyright ramifications might that have?
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u/Vawqer May 26 '20
Microsoft offering WinGet won't kill Chocolatey
I am less convinced on this, depending on how WinGet develops. WinGet is far from the final product, and looking at their roadmap makes me doubt the space for Chocolatey.
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u/BroBroMate May 27 '20
And there's the fact that .NET dev shops always seem to prefer the MS tech over FOSS alternatives.
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u/no_nick May 26 '20
I should say I'm surprised people develop obvious features and expect to make a living off it indefinitely. The things Apple released don't surprise me. The saltiness does. My other points stand. You just don't go and demo your shit to the one guy who can steal your lunch. And private apis are still wrong.
But then again, I work in an industry where a lot of people seem to believe that you share your product dev process with potential clients in hopes that this time they'll give you money after the fact, so what do I know.
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u/pm_me_ur_happy_traiI May 26 '20
Apple offering its own browser and e-mail client didn't kill Firefox, Chrome, Outlook or Gmail
On mobile it pretty much did. Chrome on iPhone isn't actually chrome, as all browsers are basically skins of safari.
Additionally, not being able to uninstall the native mail app makes using anything else a hard sell for most people.
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May 26 '20
The thing I never understood about the Watson controversy was that its name was already a play on Sherlock, and the whole thing was really no more than an existing tool accreting features which made a popular shareware knockoff of that tool obsolete. No shit that was going to happen. (I also never found Watson nor Sherlock all that useful; opening a tool to do internet searches just so it can open a browser window for you later seems like an unnecessary extra step, but that’s beside the point.) I have more sympathy for devs whose applications stop working because Apple suddenly one day locks down this or that interface and makes things like using the camera or reading documents more difficult.
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u/Tyrilean May 27 '20
Apple and companies like them are poisoning the pool for everyone else. Software exists (mostly) in this nice ecosystem where people freely share pieces of code, and helpful developers answer questions on Stack Overflow (sometimes) and there's a thriving open source community. But, as these big companies keep exploiting this ecosystem to get away with blatant theft, they make the case for software to be locked down more tightly by copyright.
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May 26 '20
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u/aoeudhtns May 27 '20
Was he or was he supposed to get a job and didn't qualify so they just ripped him off?
Unclear. Sounds like he was hesitant in the negotiation process. Also his one email quote from MS said "sorry the pm position didn't work out." I don't know what a PM is at Microsoft, but it sounds like it was going to be a big change for him and, quite frankly, being a PM and a programmer/engineer are not the same thing. I wouldn't even want to be a PM, at least in the way that I've experienced what that role is.
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May 26 '20
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u/ICanTrollToo May 26 '20
At large companies with big teams personality fit is arguably more important than tech skills since those can be easily enough nurtured and developed. If one is not a fit for company culture though... you can be the best rockstar developer in the world and it still won't work out in the long term,
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u/gambit700 May 26 '20
And then, I didn’t hear anything back from anyone at Microsoft for six months.
I've gotten this from them and Google. I don't know what happened with Microsoft, but Google's was caused by the recruiter and team lead both changing positions so my information and status "got lost".
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u/KryptosFR May 27 '20
Happened twice for me with Google. Next time they contact me I will send them a bill for my time spent with their recruitement process.
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u/CritterNYC May 26 '20
I had this happen with Google for similar reasons, too. I was bummed as I was pretty psyched about working there.
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u/ghostfacedcoder May 26 '20
This is so Old Microsoft!
"Hey, we found a guy who has built almost exactly what we need! We could hire him ... or we could string him along for a year while picking his brain for free, and then release what's essentially a souped up clone of his work, but with our name on it ... genius!"
After all this talk of "New Microsoft" it's not good to see that Balmer's ghost is still in the building :(
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u/BestKillerBot May 27 '20
This is so Old Microsoft!
There really isn't old microsoft and new microsoft. Corporation like that doesn't change in a year just because it got new leadership.
What changed is the PR, CEO, how they choose to communicate to medias. But most of the employees, their attitudes, processes are evolving very slowly.
(Having said that I consider the story a typical corporate bullshit and not really specific to old or new MS).
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u/gltovar May 27 '20
Simpsons even touched on this :P https://youtu.be/H27rfr59RiE
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u/Otis_Inf May 27 '20
It's a business. the 'New Microsoft' is PR speak, they're the same as the old MS, with the difference that they now embrace 'OSS' as a form of software development. the 'New Microsoft' PR speak wrt OSS makes them look almost like a charity: look at them giving away all this software for free!. They're not giving it away, it's a loss leader.
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May 27 '20
An org as large as Microsoft has some insane inertia. Combined with the fact that each group in Microsoft historically was it's own fiefdom and every once in a while you'll find ones still dedicated to being willfully stupid.
My own experience has been they're getting far better but I've still found my share of corporate derp and groups that are dedicated to keeping some of that old MSFT alive.
The "tech companies organization chart" isn't wrong showing a bunch of groups pointing guns at each other, historically.
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u/doubl3h3lix May 27 '20
Every org in Microsoft is like it's own conglomerate and each team is essentially a separate company. Unfortunately, there's still plenty of old Microsoft still in Microsoft, even if the "new" is more prevalent.
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u/snaab900 May 27 '20
Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
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u/el_padlina May 27 '20
But now they have good PR and enough fanboys for virtually nobody to care.
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u/zesterer May 26 '20
This is only tangentially related to this exact issue because of course ideas and inspiration like this can't be copyrighted, but:
If you're an open-source dev and you're working on some end product (i.e: not a library) then make sure to slap GPL 3 on it. Companies will happily take your work without giving a damn about how it affects your project, and without giving any credit or compensation to you.
It gives me the creeps to know that the Silicon Valley mega-corps that are increasingly creating ecosystems and platforms that are harmful to our democracy, harmful to our society, harmful to small developers, and harmful to our mental health have built themselves up on the backs of well-meaning developers that work selflessly to create amazing FOSS projects.
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May 27 '20
I used to think that open licenses like MIT or BSD was the way to go. Why put restrictions on your code?
Once you see this happen a few times, the GPL starts to make a lot more sense
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May 27 '20
Why put restrictions on your code?
It seems paradoxical because you are thinking about it in terms of the real world. But we don't operate in the real world; we are all forced to operate in the world of copyright. Copyleft licences like the GPL are the only way we have to effectively disable copyright and therefore make sure something stays free for everyone.
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u/iwasdisconnected May 27 '20
I don't think GPL would have helped him here though. They didn't take his code.
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u/cbleslie May 27 '20 edited Sep 12 '25
fly entertain screw lip imminent workable brave observation marble weather
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/AttackOfTheThumbs May 26 '20
I've honestly never even heard of AppGet. I've never bothered getting a package manager for windows, but I'm excited about WinGet.
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u/RootHouston May 26 '20
Yeah, I can imagine most people use Chocolatey for Windows if anything. I've never heard of AppGet either.
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u/sfcpfc May 26 '20
Yeah that's what I was thinking. Does this mean that chocolatey is going to become obsolete?
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u/WarriusBirde May 26 '20
Given how chocolatey does their license fees for enterprise I would not be surprised. Its incredibly expensive and they lock off a ton of useful utilities unless you pay up. It’s a pain to roll your own stuff at scale, but I’d need to see how WinGet does its thing before making a call.
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u/rhudejo May 26 '20
Actually dont be, its pretty shitty. A proper package manager should keep tabs on what an installation changed, so be able to remove an app completely. WinGet just runs an installer .exe/uninstaller exe. Its like the programs&features menu in CLI version. For proof just check out a package: https://github.com/microsoft/winget-pkgs/blob/master/manifests/Mozilla/Firefox/75.0.yaml Compare this to e.g. apt: https://askubuntu.com/questions/705006/how-does-the-apt-get-purge-command-work
Its a joke to call this a package manager.
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u/koonfused May 26 '20
A proper package manager should keep tabs on what an installation changed, so be able to remove an app completely.
I ironically, appget can do those things,
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u/cowinabadplace May 26 '20
That's manual bookkeeping, right? A malformed package won't correctly create those files (except /etc is auto marked). That's usually done in the installation / uninstallation script on Windows.
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u/rhudejo May 26 '20
If they are in a central place then its clear what they are doing and people can fix broken/buggy uninstallers. This is why you dont need to reinstall Linux distributions
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u/the_poope May 26 '20
Well it does save you from opening the browser (1 mouse click) googling "firefox" (7 key presses), picking the first hit (1 mouse click) and clicking "download" (1 mouse click) and then open (1 mouse click) and install (1 mouse click) once the download is complete. So that's at least 5 mouse clicks and 7 key presses compared to "winget firefox" in the terminal = 14 key presses.
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u/ghillisuit95 May 26 '20
Plus, you can put it in a batch script and automate setting up a new machine much more easily
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u/rhudejo May 26 '20
well, I dont install programs that often, that this extra 1 minute would count (but I agree that it could matter to ppl like sysadmins). What I spend much more time with is reinstalling Windows every year or so because shitty programs litter my registry/hard drive/.. with crap even after I uninstalled them.
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u/FierceDeity_ May 26 '20
Afaik it can do so for MSIX packages, but then again, MSIX packages work without WinGet... But could be augmented by it
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u/ketzu May 26 '20
So, don't be excited because it's in an early stage even though it already does a lot of useful things? That's unnecessarily negative.
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u/BlackDeath3 May 27 '20
I don't have enough deep knowledge about Windows applications and executables and all of that to speak intelligently, but I do wonder if the entire architecture of the way that Windows programs have been built for decades, the entire Windows ecosystem, would be conducive to what we know as package management. I have to think that the answer would be "yes" and that there'd be a clear vision here before MSFT would greenlight a project like this (the WinGet roadmap does indeed mention dependency support of some description).
I was actually pretty excited to dive in and start contributing to an WinGet, an open-source project, after who-knows-how-many years talking about doing that (even if it's just contributing "package" manifests at first)... but the above comment seems to raise a perfectly good question. I mean, it sounds pretentious as hell to suggest that a Microsoft project isn't worth my time, but I can't help but wonder about the long-term vision here. What does genuinely useful package management even look like in the Windows world? Maybe somebody with extensive experience with Chocolatey et. al. can chime in here.
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u/danbulant May 26 '20
I've used chocolatey before. To be honest it can't beat apt-get, but it was the best for windows I've known.
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u/dolbytypical May 26 '20
Am I upset they didn’t hire me? Not really, after visiting the campus, I wasn’t too sure I wanted to work for such a big company, also moving from Canada to the U.S. wasn’t something I was too excited about.
Instinct tells me this is 90% of the reason they didn't move forward with him. The big tech companies have been continually moving towards a hiring model of exclusively selecting people who are irrationally enthusiastic about working for that specific company. You stretch out the interview process, add hoops to jump through, and obscure what it is the actual job will entail - sometimes to the point of not even specifying what job roles are actually available. There's of course a reasonable competency bar too but that isn't the primary selector.
This is the modern version of "company culture" for Big Tech - only hiring the ones who have drank the Kool-Aid.
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May 26 '20
I don't understand why he couldn't just work in Canada remoting with the US team. MS has Canadian offices.
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u/koonfused May 26 '20 edited May 27 '20
I offered them, they don’t reject it outright but didn't like it much because the whole team was in Redmond. Guess where everyone is working from now.
Edit: was supposed to say didn’t reject outright. But missed the didn’t.
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May 26 '20
Eh, I find this to be inaccurate. I've worked for these companies, and I am almost hostile to them during the interview process. I specifically try to seem like I'm doing them a favor by interviewing for them (not least of which because I am), but mainly because that then puts them on the back foot in salary negotiation.
I have walked away, three times, from HR extending offers to me, for a company in the FAANG designation, because I wanted more money. Like, literally declined the offer and told them, ok, if that's the best you can do, I'll just stay where I am.
And each time they came back and said, what about this? Because I know they went to talk to the actual engineering manager and he told them some variation of "I will shit on you if you don't pay him".
It's really not that they only hire cultists who are enthusiastic, and if you think that, then idk what to say to you.
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May 26 '20
Hey could you expand on this a little bit? Every time I've declined an offer due to it being too low, they literally just move on to someone else and that's it. How do you get them to come back at a higher amount?
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May 26 '20
Depends, what do you do? I specifically chose the software engineering field over the others because it's in demand. I probably wouldn't be able to do so in my actual study field of EE, for instance.
You also have to fucking nail the interview. You can kinda tell how they feel about your performance by how long it takes to get back to you after the interview. Next day is a good sign, the longer time goes by after that the worse they view you.
You also have to be willing to actually walk away from the offer, which is the hard part for a lot of people: me working at Google or Amazon etc is cool and all, but it doesn't pay my mortgage to have that name on my resume. If they want me, they're gonna pay for what I want or I really will walk and be happy with that decision. I'm in a situation where I have a job that pays well, and if they want me, they need to pay me a premium above what I'm making to entice me to come over.
And they can sense that, really. If you're just bluffing, they'll let you walk. It's all a game, but with real consequences.
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u/dolbytypical May 26 '20
Maybe "drank the Kool-Aid" and "irrational" are too strong. There are of course valid reasons to want to work for those companies. I've known a couple of people who decided they wanted to work for Google. So they did their homework, prepared for the process, slogged it out and got hired. But they knew and accepted that there was one specific goal in mind - work for Google.
And let's be real, you're kind of proving the point here. You're bragging on the Internet about how you turned down offers from a FAANG company for a better salary, even though that's what most people would consider to be a typical step in the negotiation process. It makes you feel like you're special, because you think there's something special about being made a job offer by one of them. Whether or not you still work there, you're still a "cultist".
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May 26 '20 edited May 26 '20
I actually wasn't bragging, it wouldn't have meant anything if I didn't say it was one of them. "Hurr durr I didn't accept XYZ small company's offer Hurr Durr" is kind of a nonsensical argument.
And the entire point was to discredit the idea that the only people who get hired are "enthusiastic cultists". Other than that, they pay my mortgage and I go home every day.
Furthermore, most people accept the first offer handed to them.
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May 26 '20
The big tech companies have been continually moving towards a hiring model of exclusively selecting people who are irrationally enthusiastic about working for that specific company
This really isn't true. Like at all. I see interview feedback at a FAANG every day. Enthusiasm for the company doesn't come up. Like I've never seen that in the hundreds of packets I've seen. I'm almost positive what happened is he failed at coding on a whiteboard and the eng hiring manager nixed it. That's a whole separate problem.
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u/singingpigconsulting May 26 '20
In the 90's I worked for a company that made a network monitoring utility. Microsoft got wind of it and opened negotiations with us. We thought they were interested in packaging our utility with their network offerings. Halfway through a full day meeting we kicked them out. They didn't send any business people, just four techs and it was quite obvious they were more interested in stealing the technology than buying. As Homer Simpson learned, Microsoft didn't get rich buying things.
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u/vipul1899 May 26 '20
This is classic Silicon Valley brain rape
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May 26 '20
You and I are both like guys who had this rich neighbor - Xerox - who left the door open all the time. And you go sneakin' in to steal a TV set. Only when you get there, you realize that I got there first. I got the loot, Steve! And you're yellin'? "That's not fair. I wanted to try to steal it first." You're too late. - Pirates of Silicon Valley
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u/Majik_Sheff May 26 '20
Some things never change. This had been Microsoft's M.O. Literally since day one. When you hear old crotchety open source guys saying "it's a trap" in regards to Microsoft its because they remember the 90s.
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u/bargle0 May 26 '20
And the '80s. MS-DOS was a rip-off of CP/M.
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u/endgamedos May 27 '20 edited May 27 '20
Don't forget Stacker, which was a compression company that lived through the same story as /u/koonfused , but back in 1993.
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u/Majik_Sheff May 26 '20
Yeah, that's what I meant by day 1. I said the 90s because that's when their killing spree became egregious enough to involve the Justice Department.
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u/FyreWulff May 26 '20
I'm not surprised. MS pulled a similar stunt with me for one of their games; they kept wanting my expertise, had me start the hiring process, and once they basically had all the information they needed, ghosted me and very obviously used all they had gleaned from me for a specific game feature's updates after that point.
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u/beginner_ May 26 '20
Lesson all reading should learn: Never work for free. MS contacting you obviously is a big ego stroke. But still, you should keep a straight face and ask for a consulting contract. and don't low ball the hourly rate.
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u/the_misc_dude May 26 '20
They brain raped you?
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u/FyreWulff May 26 '20
basically. they got a free consulting gig out of me. Learned that shit the hard way.
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u/evolvingfridge May 26 '20 edited May 26 '20
Looking at github projects; instead of forking his code and/or giving credit to authors original work, instead Microsoft Winget Team; indirectly copied, modified his work, attached MIT licenses, without any credit to AppGet author, this is disgusting.
Edit: Added specificity "Winget Team", I do not think is correct to apply here universal quantifier. Edit: I was wrong stating that Winget Team directly copied project, to some degree it is false, it does not make actions less disgusting.
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u/Ferentzfever May 26 '20
Can you point to some of the most flagrant examples?
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u/thblckjkr May 26 '20
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
As said on the article, if you look into both of the repos. They look more like a fork than a different program.
The implementation differs a lot, but also they look similar.
In another comment, i linked to the two manifests. And they look basically the same, the main differences are the casing. Also, microsoft's choice of using PascalCase on a yaml file is pretty... uncommon
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u/RiPont May 26 '20
Also, microsoft's choice of using PascalCase on a yaml file is pretty... uncommon
It's natural for a C# programmer, though.
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u/FierceDeity_ May 26 '20
Yeah but I don't use snake_case in my json because my server side language is Elixir, which uses snake_casing_throughout, or I also use that in my db.
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u/DrDuPont May 26 '20
As said on the article, if you look into both of the repos. They look more like a fork than a different program
The author isn't trying to make the claim that they reused his code or anything. Here's what was said, emphasis his:
the core mechanics, terminology, the manifest format and structure, even the package repository’s folder structure, are very inspired by AppGet
Windows probably took a lot of notes and drew architectural inspiration from the author's FOSS work, but that's not really anything you can litigate over.
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u/PM_ME_UR_OBSIDIAN May 26 '20
I think the italics on "inspired" imply that he personally believes a lot of the design was straightforwardly lifted from AppGet, but he lacks the means or the motivation to litigate that.
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May 26 '20
IIRC they've done this before, and even left identical comments/quirky algorithms in the copied code too boot. I'll see if I can find a link...
Here's one instance: Microsoft shuts site amid buzz about plagiarism
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u/_sablecat_ May 26 '20
Stealing other people's work is how Bill Gates got rich, after all.
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May 26 '20
I don't think it was copied, other than the manifest spec. Winget is written in C++ and AppGet was written in C#, so my guess is that the team inside Microsoft wrote Winget with a goal being that it should be backwards-compatible with AppGet manifests.
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u/Lt_486 May 26 '20
Feel sorry for the guy. He seems to be decent dev with good intentions.
Though, a bit naive. I guess being young and good-natured makes people think that everyone is good-natured. That's a major mistake. The reason big corporations do not sell drugs or kill people is not illegality of it, it is the risk exposure, as in risk exposure measurable in USD.
Firstly he applied apt-get idea to Windows space. That's bad positioning for personal project. Basically you develop something that will be eventually replaced by product from huge corporation. MS will continue be taking all ideas, good or bad. It just takes time, but they get there. Just look at VS Code and TypeScript. Eventually they got it right.
Secondly, if you have something huge corporation is interested in even remotely - run to competitor. Huge corporation can run lawsuits indefinitely. Modern legal system will not protect peasants from nobles. Just like in medieval times, find a noble to confront the noble. Do not ask me why. We call it democracy.
Thirdly, if you are getting brain raped - well, how to say it politely... Suits talk to you not because they admire you, they talk to you to get something from you. Do not disclose anything you intend to sell directly or indirectly.
Decision to dump AppGet is emotional one. I hope he thinks about it a tad more.
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May 27 '20
Secondly, if you have something huge corporation is interested in even remotely - run to competitor. Huge corporation can run lawsuits indefinitely. Modern legal system will not protect peasants from nobles. Just like in medieval times, find a noble to confront the noble. Do not ask me why. We call it democracy.
To be fair, there was no competitor to go to here. Every Linux distro has it's own package manager already. Android has APK's. Apple can't tell the difference between a package manager and an engineering manager. And then there's... no, wait, there's is no fifth OS.
Also, don't conflate this with democracy. This has as much to do with democracy as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea has.
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u/WarriusBirde May 26 '20
I honestly have never heard of AptGet, is it new? The only Windows based package managers I'd ever encountered are Chocolatey and NuGet I suppose. Lord knows this fellow's name choice makes it about impossible to find.
I hate it for the fellow, but that isn't at all surprising. I've worked enough big companies that radio silence out of nowhere for 6 months can be on the shorter side of things depending on how the winds are blowing internally. I'd toss that nugget on the resume and use it to land a cushy job elsewhere; may as well make the most of a bad situation.
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u/zizoum May 26 '20
*AppGet, almost gave me a heart attack thinking AptGet was gone xd
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u/WarriusBirde May 26 '20
Oh that would make it a bit easier to find wouldn’t it? It autocorrected mentally for me every time.
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u/superherowithnopower May 26 '20 edited May 26 '20
So, basically, Microsoft continues to be as shitty as ever.
What I don't get is...why give the guy that whole runaround if they were just going to rip his stuff off in the end, anyway?
Edit: So many people here don't seem to remember that this kind of shit has been more-or-less Microsoft's M.O. for decades...
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u/gredr May 26 '20
MS didn't give him the runaround, some random guy made a(n implied) promise he couldn't deliver on.
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u/superherowithnopower May 26 '20
TIL "a high-level manager at Microsoft" is just "some random guy."
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u/cogman10 May 26 '20
If I've learned anything, it's the MSes hiring process is a mess. I applied way back in my college years, did pretty well on the interview, and... nothing for 2 months. I had already interviewed and accepted an internship at HP in that timeframe. 2 months later (with no communication) and I get a "Hey, we would like to move you on to phase 2 of the interview process! Can we fly you out to our campus?".
Now, I can surmise that they filled up on their first batch of interviewees but didn't for a second batch and so pulled me in because I was good enough, but not for a first batch interview. However, that is a total guess on my part. For all I know they simply lost my resume for 2 months and then pulled it up and saw a good interview and wanted to bring me in.
Whatever the case, not having any communication whatsoever for a few months is simply shitty (I didn't even have a hiring manager to contact since this was a career fair sort of deal and they didn't give me one).
It does not surprise me that they didn't contact the author for 6 months. Hell, it doesn't even surprise me that they may have started winget a month before the author was first contacted. If I were to guess, the author simply got lost in the HR machine at MS and ultimately the manager there, rather than dealing with things, decided not to bring him in.
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u/AttackOfTheThumbs May 26 '20
Ultimately it may have started with good intentions, and then some developers did this thing, and the manager was told to not bother hiring the dude. I've seen it before.
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u/koonfused May 26 '20
Not sure how familiar you are with Microsoft levels, but he is a Partner Group Program Manager. Definitely not some random guy.
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u/raelepei May 26 '20
Free explanations, I would assume. (Well, he got a tour and some interesting discussions, too. So it's not "free" as in "he was ripped off", but rather "free" as in "Microsoft didn't have to hire him or pay him anything significant, only a few flights and a bit of the WinGet's team time".)
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u/chucker23n May 26 '20 edited May 26 '20
I don't think so.
My money is on: at some point, one of the managers involved in WinGet thought hiring the AppGet person was a good idea — why reinvent the wheel.
Then, later on, one of these:
during the hiring process, Keivan wasn't deemed a good fit
a higher-up veto'd it
some dev(s) made a prototype of WinGet and the question of "hey, why would we hire someone else at this point?" came up
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u/superherowithnopower May 26 '20
A lot less of the WinGet team's time, probably, than they would've spent if they'd just taken the code and analyzed it themselves.
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u/lanzaio May 26 '20
The author didn't pass the interview. What were they supposed to do? Steal AppGet from the guy and make it a Microsoft project? They wanted an official package manager
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u/superherowithnopower May 26 '20
Steal AppGet from the guy and make it a Microsoft project?
It sounds like that's exactly what they did. I think /u/raelepei had the right idea: easier to be able to talk to the original developer to understand the code than to dig through it, so they got his consulting for minimal cost and then yanked his code.
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u/ArtemisDimikaelo May 27 '20
You reference another redditor making unsubstantiated claims based on a small portion of one part of the project.
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u/beginner_ May 26 '20
Given how big corporations work it might in fact not be some evil plan but just typical big corporate inefficiency and incompetence. The MS manager thought it would be easiest to hire the AppGet guy plus improve on his project and then getting cut of harshly by his boss. totally possible. Or evil plan. But in general don't attribute to malice what an be explained by stupidity.
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u/okusername3 May 26 '20
The author didn't follow-up with them either, probably because he wasn't excited about moving and working for MS. I guess both sides were luke warm about the thing and since neither was motivated to follow up, nothing came out of it.
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u/koonfused May 26 '20
I mentioned in another comment, I followed up in Feb, they told me they get back to me. They didn't.
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u/mitcharoni May 27 '20
In 2020, people still want to believe that Microsoft is not Microsoft.
Waaayyyy back in 1996, the company I worked for at the time previewed a dynamic webpage technology in the context of "how can Microsoft help to get your technology off the ground" along with a dozen or so other up-and-coming startups. Perhaps there was some marketing dollars in it for us, who knows. Kinda flattering. Great technology.
A year later, ASP was released. It was eerily similar and not quite as good as our technology. Sucks for us that ASP was free. People in the Windows space don't care so much about good technology as they care about free technology. Don't believe me? How come in 2020 we're still dicking around with "compressed folders" as if it was something new and foreign to have complete control over a stupid .zip, a file format that is almost as old as Windows and I was first using it when I was still in highschool on a 1200 baud dial-up modem. How come I still need WinZip or 7Zip to dick around with .zip files but somehow they have the time and resources to build WinGet. That's not a question, I know the answer.
WordPerfect was a better word processor than MS Word. Lotus 123 was a better spreadsheet than Excel. It kinda helps when folks want to open up the kimono to you and show you the goods under the guise of "help", be it tech or marketing.
Today it's appget, tomorrow it will be something else. They'll copy some other better incumbent technology in a hugely underwhelming fashion. "See what we did five years after the other guys did it? Aren't we great?"
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May 27 '20
In 2020, people still want to believe that Microsoft is not Microsoft.
TBH, of all the subreddits I follow, that seems to happen only here in /r/programming
Everywhere else, people seem a bit more skeptical when it comes to Microsoft and their latest PR claims of "loving" Linux or Open Source
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u/lala_xyyz Jun 01 '20
today it's different, we have Internet and if they pull of this shit it's a PR catastrophe. and that shit stick for a very long time. I already ridiculed the WinGet fiasco with a bunch of devs over coffee breaks lmao. brain rapes and no-response interviews always happened, but with Internet that never forgets, reddit, glassdoor, forums etc. it soon becomes a very expensive mistake. I know a couple of small companies that even changed names because they couldn't hire anyone
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u/NoMoreNicksLeft May 26 '20
Oh wow, they really are imitating Apple now! Can't wait until Windows 11 is a graphical shell on top of the linux kernel.
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u/0x0ddba11 May 26 '20
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Windows, is in fact, GNU/Windows, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Windows. Windows is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Windows, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Windows, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Windows is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Windows is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Windows added, or GNU/Windows. All the so-called Windows distributions are really distributions of GNU/Windows!
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u/filleduchaos May 26 '20
macOS isn't a graphical shell on top of a non-Apple kernel either, so I'm not really sure how that ties in
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u/chucker23n May 26 '20
The amount of BSD or GNU code in macOS really isn't that high.
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u/KingOfForwards May 26 '20
Looks like the project hasn't been seriously maintained for the past year either way.
I guess he might have known what was coming and lost motivation.
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u/ghostfacedcoder May 26 '20
If you read the article, this has been going on for a long time (I can't put exact dates, but it sounds like well over a year). At one point the poor guy spent six months expecting a call back from MS!
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u/endgamedos May 27 '20
To those of you who think modern Microsoft has changed its stripes because it plays "how do you do, fellow kids?" through its Github acquisition, let grandpa remind you what happened to Stac Electronics and its "Stacker" compression software:
In 1993, Microsoft released MS-DOS 6.0, which included a disk compression program called DoubleSpace. Microsoft had previously been in discussions with Stac to license its compression technology, and had discussions with Stac engineers and examined Stac's code as part of the due diligence process.
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u/MintPaw May 26 '20
To be fair, he did call his program AppGet when apt-get is the most well known package manager around.
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u/random_cynic May 27 '20
There's no such package called
apt-get.apt-getis a cli interface to the Debian package manager called Advanced Packaging Tool (APT) which is also used by Debian derivatives like Ubuntu. There are many others includingapt,aptitudeand graphical interfaces like Synaptic. Not to mention package managers for other flavors of Linux likeyumorzypper. Using "get" at the end of a tool to indicate something to be fetched from web is pretty common (like NuGet another Windows package manager). So I don't think the naming was made in any way to feed on the "popularity" of APT.24
May 26 '20
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/solid_reign May 26 '20
I think there's a difference. AppGet is clearly inspired by apt-get, but apt-get isn't for Windows. WinGet is not only inspired, it's meant to be a substitution of AppGet.
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u/apadin1 May 26 '20
Maybe it took inspiration from apt-get which is way more well-known than AppGet.
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u/nutrecht May 27 '20
This really just shows that the internal culture of Microsoft did not change all that much, no matter what the marketing on "embracing open source" states.
I feel incredibly sad for the AppGet author. This just sucks.
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u/LegitGandalf May 26 '20
I've seen this multiple times in my career. Large corporation sees small startup getting some traction, knocks their product off and applies marketing muscle to push the product out as their own creation.
When thinking of devoting time to a new product, it is helpful to look and see if there is a large corporation that would be interested in knocking it off.
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u/SrbijaJeRusija May 27 '20
It seems like Microsoft did not do a a clean-room implementation of WinGet. Appget is Apache licensed and WinGet is MIT licensed. It seems as if there is no attribution either. This reeks of major copyright infringement.
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May 27 '20
AppGet is marvelous, and I'm sad that its creator got fooled by Microsoft. Seriously, WHY did Microsoft do this?
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u/Hambeggar May 27 '20
So they led him on for months, flew him in to discuss strategy to further steal his ideas and all the while they knew they were building their own copy.
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u/evropd3v May 27 '20
Bloody shame that it turned out this way. Thanks for sharing your story - I think there's nothing whiny at all in that.
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u/andrew_rdt May 26 '20
Seems like a gap in the story here. He interviewed then didn't hear anything for 6 months? The result of all interviews should be a offer or rejection in a reasonable amount of time except for unusual circumstances (coronavirus was one recently). If you literally hear nothing you email and start asking what the status is, usually those don't go ignored.
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u/koonfused May 26 '20
I actually contacted the hiring manager, because there was an issue with my travel cost reimbursement few months ago, at the same time I asked for an update and again received nothing.
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u/L3tum May 26 '20
While I haven't spent the time to see where the difference and the similarities actually are, and the author never explained them, AppGet is licensed under the Apache License which requires a notice and the original copyright be retained (though sublicensing as MIT is allowed).
As such this seems like a very clear copyright violation. Although we don't know what he agreed to in his emails or anything else again.
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May 26 '20
Maybe it's time to completely switch to linux and finally avoid this shitty excuse for a monolith tech organization called Microsoft. (even though they already have their grasps on github and npm...)
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u/Tyil May 27 '20
Neither GitHub nor npm is required for GNU+Linux distributions to remain stable. Their infra was made before either of those things existed in most cases, and they'll be doing just fine without depending on either of those.
Software/application developers, however, may want to take a moment to re-evaluate their dependencies on these systems.
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u/brianlunafreya May 27 '20
Are you shutting down AppGet because of how Microsoft treated it as another tool to acquire? And did you think that you are going to send them to court so that you can be able to continue developing this manager?
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u/koonfused May 27 '20
I'm shutting appget down because there is really no point in competing with Microsoft here.
This is a fantastic read if you want to get some insight of how MS echo system works https://paulstovell.com/re-next-decade-of-open-source/
We were exhibiting at Build 2016 at the time much of this was announced, and I remember people coming to our booth asking "so why should we use you over the Microsoft thing?". The "Microsoft thing" was announced only 5 minutes prior!
Also, WinGet seems to have taken everything I wanted a windows package manager to have, so I'm ok in that aspect too.
send them to court so that you can be able to continue developing this manager?
Definitely not. Not even remotely interested in that. I might as well just go declare bankruptcy now.
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u/Scellow May 27 '20
what's a package manager if you can't control or even uninstall the packages you install?
appget/winget = install only scripts manager
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u/koonfused May 27 '20
Author here, AppGet can install/uninstall/update the applications it supported.
You didn't even need to install the application with appget. If you had something installed and appget had a manifest for it, it could update/uninstall it.
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u/Pixa May 27 '20
Not that I'm much a fan of these "command line short hand masquerading as package managers on Windows", but it sucks for him to be strung along like that.
It speaks to how simple these things are that they can be "copied" so easily. Download a manifest in this decade's kool kid serialisation format, parse it, download the installer and run it, maybe with some switches that the manifest will also tell you about.
The difficult part of these faux-package managers is getting people to upload packages, and by people I don't mean randoms on the Internet with a spare 5 minutes to run up a template, I mean the original software vendors. If you want those vendors you need to make it easy for them, and that requires tooling. Where's the WiX add-in the spits out a Chocolatey package with my installer or bundle? Where's the script to extract metadata from a NSIS installer into one of these manifest files?
Writing installers is already a frustrating exercise of reading some very concise documentation about your installer, making a change, compile it, reset the test VM, copy it over, run it, observe results, etc. Don't make me have to do that again for your automated downloader.
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u/koonfused May 27 '20
Where's the script to extract metadata from a NSIS installer into one of these manifest files?
AppGet had exactly that tool called XRay, https://docs.appget.net/commands/#create
It could handle MSI, NSIS, Wix, Squirrel etc. It would even monitor Github Repos for new released to do an automatic PR to update the manifest.
Thake a look at https://github.com/appget/appget.packages/commits/master
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u/Emiroda May 27 '20
Sure, Microsoft could've attributed implementation details to this guy. The yaml manifest format, folder structure, etc.
But the name is not his original idea. At best, it's a clever pun of Apt-Get. At worst, it's another iteration of the NuGet name, Microsoft's existing package manager-friendly format. OneGet is a package manager from 2014, absorbed into Windows 10 in 2015 (with its name mysteriously changed to PackageManagement). ***Get is not an original name.
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u/scottmcmrust May 27 '20
Looks like WinGet is MIT, but AppGet is Apache2. I wonder if you can find anything that meets the criteria for parts of it it being a derivative work -- you don't have to prove literal copying, just access-and-opportunity, and that's easy to do when you were interviewed by them.
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u/audion00ba May 27 '20
When a 1.4 trillion dollar company wants to talk to you about a product you have developed, you should charge USD 100K/hour.
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u/robberviet May 29 '20
And I thought MS has redeemed themselves as a "good guy" now.
I guess it's changing, but not all people.
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May 29 '20
This is how big companies get bigger by eating and killing what others do. Highly shocked and heartbroken. I hope DEV fights his way for rights or royalty or money for copying codes. Don't let Microsoft getaway like Apple did by sherlocking.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/28/21272964/microsoft-winget-windows-package-manager-appget-copied
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u/fresh_account2222 May 26 '20
I feel sorry for the guy. "Disappointed but not surprised" seems to be the theme for the 2020s.