3 ms·

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.microso

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-learning/ 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.

HomeDeLaPot 6y ago
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.
wayneftw 6y ago
> 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.
- boromi 6y ago
  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.

HomeDeLaPot 6y ago

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.

wayneftw 6y ago

> 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.

boromi 6y ago
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.