4 ms·

I have a similar experience to this myself. A long time ago (early 2000s) I wrote a handful of tools to ease physical to virtual (P2V) migration for Windows Se

I have a similar experience to this myself. A long time ago (early 2000s) I wrote a handful of tools to ease physical to virtual (P2V) migration for Windows Server. I was a systems administrator in the UK working for a large American firm. I wrote the tools in my own time and unlike in other countries my employer had no ownership of them, just to clear that up at the start. I did use these tools at work but never developed them on company time or resources. They were released as open source. Fast forward 6 months and we had a meeting with a virtualisation consultancy trying to sell us some tools to assist in a wider P2V programme. We had a sales guy and a tech guy visit to show us their stuff. After half an hour of them talking up all they can offer the tech guy fired up a tool and I instantly recognised it was my tool but with some rebranding. My manager looked at me slightly confused as he recognised it too. I let them continue for a few minutes to properly confirm my suspicions then mentioned that this tool was in fact a tool we already use. They were very confused until I loaded up my version on a remote system to show them. Needless to say the rest of the presentation was extremely awkward. I believe these two gentlemen thought they were in fact their own tools developed in house. It turned out several of "their" tools were in fact rebranded versions of mine. I would love to say there was some kind of exciting conclusion but in reality all that happened was they were clearly spooked by this as their/my tools were removed and never included again in their P2V toolkit. I suspect the moment they left the meeting with us they called to report what happened and rather than risk me following up (not sure how I could do that to be perfectly honest, it was FOSS after all just not used the proper way) they decided it would be safer to just pull these non-critical tools. They were just "nice to haves" anyway. My boss excitedly share the experience with the team and we had a good laugh about it and how the sales guy went from Mr Confident to stammering and stressed in a matter of seconds. We never did buy their toolkit.

thinkindie 5y ago
did you follow up with that company to make sure they granted you recognition and money for your tools?
- fifilura 5y ago
  Recognition - yes, but money - why? It was open source. This meeting does not sound at all awkward to me if I was the sales person. To me this sounds like how lots of companies work with open source to make a business. They take some open source tools (maybe they built it themselves, maybe not), package then and maybe sell some cloud service around it or simply just support. If I was the sales person I would be delighted to meet the person who wrote a part of the package. The only reason to be embarrassed is if it did not contain the correct attribution and recognition. Edit: the fact that it happened 2000 could have made it embarrassing though. Many things have changed since then...
  - satysin 5y ago
    Yes the tools were all open source. This was in 2004 and I just zipped up a compiled exe, the src directory and a license.txt (GPL2) and put it on my website. Similar to Nirsoft which is what inspired me. The reason behind it being awkward was for half an hour the sales guy had talked up how they were the only company developing tools like this, etc, etc. How the 'big players like VMware don't care about these pain points admins have to deal with' or words to that effect (which was true and why I made the tools in the first place). Then the moment he finished the sales pitch and I see these 'one of a kind tools' they have been developing I respond with "That's my tool, see..." I believe the sales guy, at least, believed all the tools he was talking about were made in house. Open source wasn't a widely understood thing back then with Microsoft talking about Linux and open source being a "cancer" and such. Really knocked him off course as I guess he had never been in that situation before (I doubt many have?). As for following up with the company. I did nothing. I was young and while I knew what they did was wrong (they literally removed my name, link to my website, etc. and put their company name but changed no functionality of the tools as far as I could see and certainly no source code was available!) I didn't have the confidence (or desire tbh) to chase up on some little tools I made to learn and make my life a little easier at work. The company disappeared (I don't know why) sometime around 2010 iirc.
  - mywittyname 5y ago
    Honestly, it sounds like they might have been willing to purchase a license from you to redistribute the code. Had you reached out, you may have received a few bucks and proper attribution for your work (and your work would have reached a broader audience).

thinkindie 5y ago

did you follow up with that company to make sure they granted you recognition and money for your tools?

fifilura 5y ago
Recognition - yes, but money - why? It was open source. This meeting does not sound at all awkward to me if I was the sales person. To me this sounds like how lots of companies work with open source to make a business. They take some open source tools (maybe they built it themselves, maybe not), package then and maybe sell some cloud service around it or simply just support. If I was the sales person I would be delighted to meet the person who wrote a part of the package. The only reason to be embarrassed is if it did not contain the correct attribution and recognition. Edit: the fact that it happened 2000 could have made it embarrassing though. Many things have changed since then...
- satysin 5y ago
  Yes the tools were all open source. This was in 2004 and I just zipped up a compiled exe, the src directory and a license.txt (GPL2) and put it on my website. Similar to Nirsoft which is what inspired me. The reason behind it being awkward was for half an hour the sales guy had talked up how they were the only company developing tools like this, etc, etc. How the 'big players like VMware don't care about these pain points admins have to deal with' or words to that effect (which was true and why I made the tools in the first place). Then the moment he finished the sales pitch and I see these 'one of a kind tools' they have been developing I respond with "That's my tool, see..." I believe the sales guy, at least, believed all the tools he was talking about were made in house. Open source wasn't a widely understood thing back then with Microsoft talking about Linux and open source being a "cancer" and such. Really knocked him off course as I guess he had never been in that situation before (I doubt many have?). As for following up with the company. I did nothing. I was young and while I knew what they did was wrong (they literally removed my name, link to my website, etc. and put their company name but changed no functionality of the tools as far as I could see and certainly no source code was available!) I didn't have the confidence (or desire tbh) to chase up on some little tools I made to learn and make my life a little easier at work. The company disappeared (I don't know why) sometime around 2010 iirc.
- mywittyname 5y ago
  Honestly, it sounds like they might have been willing to purchase a license from you to redistribute the code. Had you reached out, you may have received a few bucks and proper attribution for your work (and your work would have reached a broader audience).