4 ms·

Extinguishing something that has a zero competitive threat? Now that would be evil! I think open-source community needs to decide whether their stuff comes wit

Extinguishing something that has a zero competitive threat? Now that would be evil! I think open-source community needs to decide whether their stuff comes with strings attached or not and use appropriate licences.

bombcar 5y ago
The "unwritten" rules around open source code/licenses is getting out of control. It's understandable, however, but people really need to decide if their code is "fully open source" and anyone can snap it up and fork it, or if there are other strings attached.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  There are people that license software under MIT or BSD licenses that gets upset when someone else runs with it or makes it proprietary. If you don’t want someone else to just dump you and run with your code without upstreaming contributions, you should at least use GPL. It won’t prevent them from forking it and never giving back, but at least you can take their contributions and merge them back into your own.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    Yeah, I feel there are many people who license as "MIT/BSD but please pretend it's LGPL/GPL3" - they want maximum adoption BUT ALSO want to remain in control and have code contributed back. To be fair, even the FSF has done the "take the ball and try to go home" with the GPL3 in some ways - not liking aspects of what they previously allowed.
iamcreasy 5y ago
Microsoft requested meeting with the author in the guise of helping him. Told him that the company would acqui-hire him and flew him out to Redmond for a interview. Did not respond to him for 6 months. And finally released their own version. I've heard similar stories coming out of Apple related to csound.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > Told him that the company would acqui-hire him No. Microsoft never wanted to acquire anything. They brought him in for a PM interview and he failed.
  - garmaine 5y ago
    Not sure why you’re being downvoted. He says in the article that Microsoft wanted to hire him to keep working on appget. He asked for an acqui-hire instead, and was told that’s not possible. He wanted more than Microsoft was willing to give.
    - iamcreasy 5y ago
      Here is an excerpt from the article: 'After about a month of prolonged email back and forth, we came to the conclusion that the arrangement will be very similar to an acqui-hire...' It was a mutual decision.
      - 908B64B197 5y ago
        But then : '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' For anyone who was involved in an acquisition, it's a polite way to say "we're not interested". And considering he describes his PM interview as "I met with four different people; three of the meetings were more like your typical interviews;" it sounds like he went through the typical hiring pipeline because an employee gave him a referral. Real acqui-hires are nothing like what he describes.
    - 908B64B197 5y ago
      > Not sure why you’re being downvoted I have no clue. It also seems to trip some throttling in HN's code. I have unapproved opinions I suppose? Maybe dang knows the reason. > He asked for an acqui-hire instead, and was told that’s not possible. The funniest thing are his grandiose claims that he "could definitely have obtained a patent" for his package manager. Despite NuGet being 10+ years old and the fact that earlier in the article he explicitly states that he wrote AppGet so that he could replicate the Linux experience on Windows [0]... That gives the reader an interesting insight on why he might have failed his interview. [0] https://medium.com/@keivan/the-day-appget-died-e9a5c96c8b22 https://medium.com/@keivan/the-day-appget-died-e9a5c96c8b22

bombcar 5y ago

The "unwritten" rules around open source code/licenses is getting out of control. It's understandable, however, but people really need to decide if their code is "fully open source" and anyone can snap it up and fork it, or if there are other strings attached.

rbanffy 5y ago
There are people that license software under MIT or BSD licenses that gets upset when someone else runs with it or makes it proprietary. If you don’t want someone else to just dump you and run with your code without upstreaming contributions, you should at least use GPL. It won’t prevent them from forking it and never giving back, but at least you can take their contributions and merge them back into your own.
- bombcar 5y ago
  Yeah, I feel there are many people who license as "MIT/BSD but please pretend it's LGPL/GPL3" - they want maximum adoption BUT ALSO want to remain in control and have code contributed back. To be fair, even the FSF has done the "take the ball and try to go home" with the GPL3 in some ways - not liking aspects of what they previously allowed.

iamcreasy 5y ago

Microsoft requested meeting with the author in the guise of helping him. Told him that the company would acqui-hire him and flew him out to Redmond for a interview. Did not respond to him for 6 months. And finally released their own version. I've heard similar stories coming out of Apple related to csound.

908B64B197 5y ago
> Told him that the company would acqui-hire him No. Microsoft never wanted to acquire anything. They brought him in for a PM interview and he failed.
- garmaine 5y ago
  Not sure why you’re being downvoted. He says in the article that Microsoft wanted to hire him to keep working on appget. He asked for an acqui-hire instead, and was told that’s not possible. He wanted more than Microsoft was willing to give.
  - iamcreasy 5y ago
    Here is an excerpt from the article: 'After about a month of prolonged email back and forth, we came to the conclusion that the arrangement will be very similar to an acqui-hire...' It was a mutual decision.
    - 908B64B197 5y ago
      But then : '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' For anyone who was involved in an acquisition, it's a polite way to say "we're not interested". And considering he describes his PM interview as "I met with four different people; three of the meetings were more like your typical interviews;" it sounds like he went through the typical hiring pipeline because an employee gave him a referral. Real acqui-hires are nothing like what he describes.
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    > Not sure why you’re being downvoted I have no clue. It also seems to trip some throttling in HN's code. I have unapproved opinions I suppose? Maybe dang knows the reason. > He asked for an acqui-hire instead, and was told that’s not possible. The funniest thing are his grandiose claims that he "could definitely have obtained a patent" for his package manager. Despite NuGet being 10+ years old and the fact that earlier in the article he explicitly states that he wrote AppGet so that he could replicate the Linux experience on Windows [0]... That gives the reader an interesting insight on why he might have failed his interview. [0] https://medium.com/@keivan/the-day-appget-died-e9a5c96c8b22 https://medium.com/@keivan/the-day-appget-died-e9a5c96c8b22