https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/issues/353
Disclaimer: I opened that issue
And credit for what? Unoriginal ideas that have been around forever?
They didn't even build WinGet in the same language as AppGet!
You can see the rest of my response to the top comment here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23377936
Regardless of that, I'm guessing he didn't engage them in dishonest attempts to hire them just to learn more about their ideas and then walk away.
I was replying to someone who only regarded the point of the credit.
> I'm guessing he didn't engage them in dishonest attempts to hire them just to learn more about their ideas and then walk away
...allegedly.
The onus of evidence is on you. Until then, we can safely assume cock-up before conspiracy.
Many, many big companies don't call you back after an interview and we all know this.
How so? It was an interview for him to bring AppGet in-house to Microsoft. That's normal software business.
Honestly, based on what this Keivan said - I think he scared Microsoft away with his demands that they take the project only in a direction that he approves of.
And when they went away, they took some of the most banal ideas, ideas that have been done a thousand times in other projects and used them in their own - which they built in a completely different programming language with exception to the very, very common YAML configuration.
> Second, be honest; do you have any stake in the game yourself? Do you work for microsoft?
Nope. People who disagree are simply wrong and I'm attempting to correct their ill-formed point of view.
Meanwhile, you're shitting up the comments with this trashy ad hominem insinuation of shilling. It's against the rules and you should stop doing it - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If they really want to fix this, they need to pay AppGet's author some money, and get something in writing so they are legally protected from copyright suits. I assume they're negotiating this right now, and that once this deal is done there will be another blog post that is more genuine.
They really messed this up because it would have been cheap to get something in writing before releasing WinGet. Someone at microsoft legal dropped the ball.
edit: This is explicitly not a judgement of ethics.
That Microsoft didn't do any of that indicates that they do not believe that WinGet is a derivative work of AppGet under copyright law, so the copyright license granted by the Apache License is not needed.
ETA: That is, Microsoft believes they don't need a copyright license. My personal position is that I would have liked to see a proper fork under the ALv2 with attribution, which would have avoided all this mess.
You have to adhere to the terms of the copyright license granted in this case by upstream License. If you do not, you lose the copyright license and the ability to redistribute under any terms.
Maybe you're thinking of license subsumption? That's when (say) a project under a more restrictive license (e.g. Apache License 2.0) bundles a dependency which is under a more permissive license (e.g. MIT), yet the package is advertised as being under "Apache License 2.0" even though the licensing is polyglot.
But even under subsumption, you still don't get to do things like removing copyright notices or declaring unilaterally that somebody else's work is now under some new license they didn't grant. The license headers in the bundled dependency's source files don't get modified, it's just that you summarize the terms of the complete package because fulfilling the terms of the ALv2 suffices to fulfill the terms of the MIT license. (Sort of. License subsumption is a complicated issue.)
- https://github.com/Lutando/Akkatecture/issues/19
- https://github.com/Grover-c13/PokeGOAPI-Java/issues/490
- https://github.com/dsiguide/dsiguide.github.io/issues/14
Such problems do not end up in court for two reasons.
First, it costs very little to bring a project into compliance with a permissive license — all you need to do is give attribution. It's not like GPL enforcement, where you have to choose whether to open source your proprietary code or to purge the GPL'd code from the project in order to achieve compliance.
Second, the culture of permissively licensed open source communities is such that they don't generally want to foster a litigious environment which would frighten business users.
AppGet is released under Apache License 2.0, Winget under MIT, I'm not sure how copyright would be an issue.
AppGet's author addresses that point here
https://keivan.io/the-day-appget-died/#edit-to-clarify-some-...
If I gave credit to everyone who influenced the code I write, the file would be huge. Does the world have enough disk drives to hold all the credit where credit is due?
decency, morals, thoughtfulness, that kind of thing
> If I gave credit to everyone who influenced the code I write...
They directly ripped it off.
Big companies will try not to pay even when they have money. To not even give the minimum of non-monetary credit is even less reason for me ever to release code under a "what's mine is yours licence".
No, they used some very common and unoriginal ideas that were implemented in AppGet.
Can you point out exactly what was "ripped off" here?
- https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli
- https://github.com/appget/appget
They're not even written in the same language. And everything done in AppGet has been done before. Yawn
> Big companies will try not to pay even when they have money.
I will try not to pay, even when I have money. I think this applies to most people. Who wants to pays for something that's already free? I'm not running a fuckin charity over here.
> To not even give the minimum of non-monetary credit...
They've given it.
However, I wonder if during all of this Keivan has credited Microsoft for all of the open source tools, services and frameworks that he's used in his other work???
from his blog
"When I showed it to my wife, the first thing she said was, “They Called it WinGet? are you serious!?” 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."
> I will try not to pay, even when I have money
Then people like you will kill off exactly the things they leech off, by pissing off those people who made them from their goodwill.
> However, I wonder if during all of this Andrew has credited Microsoft for all of the open source tools, services and frameworks that he's used in his other work???
I don't know, has he? Why raise the question instead of answering it.
You're curiously willing to defend microsoft.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AptGet
I wonder if he mentioned his name was inspired by the extremely more well known and 22 year old default package manager in linux that happens to be called apt-get.
I mean honestly if he's saying that as justification in his blog post, I'm immediately off his team. That's insane. Obviously a layman would think the name was ripped off if they didn't know about apt-get.
I compared the manifest format, that's different terminology. And WinGet has more insightful supports, e.g. MinOSVersion, License, LicenseUrl.
And the folder structure is different also. That's per version per file on WinGet but single YAML on AppGet. I'm pretty sure his wife can't handle that if she is not a developer.
"Core Mechanics" => It needed more proof.
How many products have "Git" or "React" in their name? Does everybody accuse these people of ripping off Linus Torvalds or Facebook?
> Then people like you will kill off exactly the things they leech off, by pissing off those people who made them from their goodwill.
Because I don't want to pay for the air that I breathe?? Mmkay.
> I don't know, has he? Why raise the question instead of answering it.
You should be answering it because you're the one accusing Microsoft without knowing the whole story.
> You're curiously willing to defend microsoft.
Whenever I see imbalanced, ill-informed or illogical conclusions I speak out against them.
This is "ripping off" now? Maybe they did steal it wholesale, maybe not, but I haven't seen any evidence (nay, even allegations) of it.
The allegation is right there. His blog. Which I quoted from. But didn't link to, so sorry, here it is https://keivan.io/the-day-appget-died/
If Beigi was smart he would've asked them to purchase the copyrights as he's the only one legally entitled to do so.
If he's developing his software altruistically he should be satisfied with his credit, well knowing that his project will now be overshadowed by Microsoft's and will eventually pass into oblivion and be forgotten.
It was well-received on GitHub. 15 thumbs up, 3 thumbs down. This is in a thread where people are showing a lot of support for @kayone.
https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/issues/353#issuecomm...
Side note: It's amusing that @aclinick doesn't have an avatar on GitHub, given these three facts: 1) @aclinick works for Microsoft 2) GitHub is a Microsoft property 3) LinkedIn is also a Microsoft property and has a very strict avatar policy
Nobody should get fired (Keivan himself said so in the Github issue), but now that there is some public attention on this, let the parties involved find an amicable way to resolve it their own satisfaction.
- we released a thing
- yes we spent time courting the guy who made a version of the thing that ours looks suspiciously like, turns out he’s really good
- well yes our thing has a lot of features taken from the other thing!
- we’re excited for the future!! Maybe that guy can even help us out since he loves open source so much hahaha
Tone deaf at best, implied fuck you at worst.
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-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.
Edit, this ZDNet article adds no new information and nothing has changed since the other articles have come out, but I guess it's good that more places are covering it to signal boost this properly.
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23375624