I once interviewed a smart guy from a certain UC across the bay. Still undergrad, he played a lot with Python and wished he could have something similar to pip when doing C/C++.
So he wrote himself a "package manager" that could fetch binaries, place header files correctly and add them to his build. Neat little project.
That's basically what this guy did. It reads a YAML file and exec() whatever build instruction is in there. The CS102 guy I hired could do it as well.
Keivan was brought in by Microsoft for an interview and he didn't get the job. He kept talking about how "he could have patented this" or how it was an "acquihire" but there's nothing new to acquire in there! I mean it's not like he invented package management (NuGet, Chocolatey, Scoop all predate his attempt).
But hey, he flunked his interview and got a lot of eyes on his startup thanks to some well placed clickbait on HN...
No. Both package managers are open-source and share no code. They aren't even written in the same language. [0] [1]
It seems the author of AppGet wanted to sell it to Microsoft and Microsoft didn't see anything worth to acquire. He never even spoke to the people who could make the purchasing decision. Then they gave him a regular PM interview and it seems he failed it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28794352
I can only repeat myself: Microsoft is Microsoft, whatever they do.
https://medium.com/@keivan/the-day-appget-died-e9a5c96c8b22
That said they DO credit him now on the repository. The whole story still feels really bizarre though.