I dunno, getting inspired and copying all the ideas, deciding that they can do a good enough job internally instead of hiring Keivan doesn’t sound like a bad thing in and of itself.
It’s the stringing along that makes my blood boil. After reading things like this, I’m thinking, what I’d do differently?
Maybe have them reimburse all my travel upfront. No money, no meetings.
Also, bill all the meetings and conversations. Up front, given their reputation from this story. They want to spend my time, better show how serious they are. No money, no meetings, no false hopes.
But they know young geeks can be excited that someone at THE Microsoft noticed them, like in the Hollywood success stories, and walk an extra mile. Who knows, I could have lost my shit 20 years ago. This straight up exploitation irks me to no end. Reminds me of rock stars bedding teenage fangirls and similar shit, maybe this is why.
>I dunno, getting inspired and copying all the ideas, deciding that they can do a good enough job internally instead of hiring Keivan doesn’t sound like a bad thing in and of itself.
It just completely kills the motivation to make any kind of system tools like this. If your tool fails, you have wasted your time. If it succeeds, the OS vendor will kill it overnight with a free knock-off, so you have also wasted your time.
OS/platform vendors should know it better if they want to maintain a thriving ecosystem of contributors, but nobody seems to care anymore. Shops knocking off most successful products with store brands, Apple doing the same with some popular apps, Amazon Basics, this. And then we wonder why so many people are depressed and don't see a future for themselves anymore.
You do these tools for yourself and to scratch your own itch. As long as it fulfills its function, you get value. The fact that someone else may want to use it or the big vendor would like to adopt it should be secondary at best.
If you yourself don’t need such a tool and you also don’t want to do it as an exercise of the art, then don’t do it. Spend your time on something that’s gonna bring value to you instead.
You could release your code with a less permissive license (say excluding companies with a 1 trillion dollar market cap) so they at least have to play ball with you.
The GPLv3 might be enough to do that, for some. It was sufficient concern for Apple, who dumped Samba, bash, and gcc.
Microsoft's CBL/Mariner distribution of Linux would be the first place to look for GPLv3, and and impacts upon their patent portfolio (I haven't read up on the patent provisions).
"Apple, a user of GCC and a heavy user of both DRM and patents, switched the compiler in its Xcode IDE from GCC to Clang, which is another FOSS compiler but is under a permissive license. LWN speculated that Apple was motivated partly by a desire to avoid GPLv3. The Samba project also switched to GPLv3, so Apple replaced Samba in their software suite by a closed-source, proprietary software alternative."
LLVM is also more modular. The front-end and back-ends are well decoupled and it’s possible to work on them separately. Useful for a company that has to target two CPU architectures.
>I dunno, getting inspired and copying all the ideas, deciding that they can do a good enough job internally instead of hiring Keivan doesn’t sound like a bad thing in and of itself.
This is one of these things where you have to go, what did they loose by not investing in or hiring Keivan? Would the product be better, would it have got more traction, etc. Here's a juxtaposition: MS bought Github (yes, bigger scale) and chose not to build their own. The result was really good for MS, and honestly, not bad for Github users. MS needs to get better (and they are getting better) at using investment and acquisition instead of brainfscking and re-innovating. To be fair, maybe there's more to the story?
Please don't use any of these. Use scoop - it just works https://github.com/ScoopInstaller/scoop
No admin needed for almost all packages, "scoop update *" to update your system, authoring packages is very easy.
I like an I use scoop alongside winget after many years of Chocolatey, but there are many packages not available through scoop, mostly because there isn't a viable portable way to install them. Also, scoop does nothing to take advantage of the MSIX Containers that sandbox apps, so that they can be cleanly update and later removed.
I'm considering automating the conversion of my most used apps to MSIX, so they can get always installed in a clean way. That may break certain apps like Steam, which need to install outside the virtual FS, but I hear MSIX supports global registry an global FS access exceptions nowadays, so not all hope is lost.
All scoop does is extract installers/archives from the applications own portable distributions, and then create shims for them. Scoop packages aren't actually packages. They are just manifests that point to a URL to the apps download, and a list of executables to make shims/shortcuts for and that is it.
There's the nonportable bucket for apps that have er.. nonportable versions.
For anyone new to scoop, it is seriously The way that package management should work, in Windows. Apps install as the user (so no admin needed), and scoop uses a “current” symlink to point to the current version of the apps you have installed. Switching between versions or even hard-linking to a specific version is trivial. I was a little disappointed to see that some folks are ditching it for winget. While we definitely don’t need to go back to the Wild West “install things wherever you want” days, Windows needs a good package management ecosystem that works responsibly.
There's a potential interpretation of Microsoft's sponsorship as "a financial gesture to minimize a problem", sure. Without knowing more about the story, though (and there's no requirement for the author or Microsoft to share more details), perhaps we won't really know.
As founder and main developer of a product, I feel that both the first suggestion of an aqui-hire and the second suggestion of getting a regular job at MSFT are completely ludicrous. Far too weak.
Framing this as becoming an employee at MSFT directly establishes a position of inferiority. This should have been about a licensing deal with the option to purchase some premium support on top to facilitate the integration. A B2B deal will never involve HR.
You don't have to be a tough negotiator yourself, but then please seek advice from a manager representing you.
Yeah unless you are a Kernighan or Torvalds or Vanrossum aqui-hire doesn't seem like a real thing because middle management can never stand to have someone who isn't 100% under their power.
Wow that's quite a disgusting thing to do. It's surprising how measured his take was.
It's a loss for them not him as I don't think he would have fit in such backbiting culture. The whole episode is a warning for anyone developing open source stuff and is talking to MS or any big company.
I say the following not knowing anything about appget internals.
I hope I could find proper words to express the sour feelings when there's not enough credit given. It's always easy to dismiss something as: "gee, thats the obvious way to do it, there's nothing unique about it". Novel ideas always turn out to be obvious once they are implemented. The foundations of knowledge are based on the same principle. Standing on the shoulders of giants. The contrary, not giving credit, is just the nasty opposite. Appearing taller, by standing on your shoulders.
Exactly. Some "simple solution" might just be the end result of months or years of different iterations. Sometimes you can't know the best method until you've slowly and methodically tried all the worse ones.
Good read. I’ve used chocolatey a lot plus a lot of other Microsoft installation tools. Windows has been crying out for a decent package manager for years. It’s amazing how little of a sh*t Microsoft seemed to give about stuff that open-source systems provide as a first class citizen.
As they care next-to-zero about decent tooling, it’s no surprise they care even less about independent developers like Keivan.
I’m pretty sure Windows is going to turn into a Linux kernel with a Windows API translation layer and specialised UI system for ordinary Joes.
I think it’s probably a lot more efficient that way and Microsoft has already lost the kernel battle to Linux. With the shift to the cloud, I assume Azure will become Microsoft’s dominant revenue stream, with Office second and Windows third.
There's very little incentive to adopt Linux as a kernel given how popular Microsoft is with consumer grade OEMs developing for the WHQL driver program. That's one point of competitive advantage Microsoft would be nuts to let go off.
Also, sysinternals and psh alone are very compelling examples of sophisticated tooling for the Windows ecosystem. So much so that they were ported to other platforms for the Windows users wanting to explore Mac and Linux.
And while Microsoft failed so far to create a decent package management solution for Windows, the problem really isn't how to manage packages, but rather how Win32 software assumes certain levels of access to system internals. This problem was mostly solved with the introduction of MSIX, so Microsoft needs to find a better carrot to incentivize developers to deploy with MSIX so winget can work properly.
I find it a bit shallow that they throw around these words so easily. The apologies would have a bit more worth IMHO if they actually would compensate him financially for the foundational work. Sure it’s not a legal requirement but I do believe it is the right thing to do and it’s not like they would feel it…
Like someone else mentioned, this is not a source code issue. I think 90% of the people who got pissed back then thought Microsoft stole the code: get this, they didn't steal anything. One is C++ and the other is C# so it is literally impossible for a license to matter here. This would have been solved only with software patents. But I can very easily guess you're against software patents, aren't you? Or only when they're used by big evil corporations.
I hope next time you put a little thought into things you get outraged about.
Oh, and the cherry on top is you victim-shaming him. "So stupid, he used the wrong license".
You claim to with the good fight but in reality you only want to win Internet battles to enlarge your own ego.
"We reached out to Beigi to comment on the blog post and Microsoft’s overall response, but the developer says he’s still in discussions with Microsoft over the issue."
That seems like it happened unrelated to giving him additional credit. I wonder if they offered him something to sign a non-disparagement agreement.
I'd recommend retaining a lawyer as soon as a large company like Microsoft reaches out to you. (Even if it's just for your private education of risks, rights and strategy.)
Alternatively, start billing for time and travel immediately.
If they don't want to pay, tell them to meet you locally. (Let them incur travel expenses.)
This will force the company to demonstrate their intent.
If they balk at both requests, this shows that:
1. They don't have managerial approval for their escapade.
Or...
2. They intend to take advantage of you to the extent that they can.
Either way, it shows they need to get their ducks in a row. And prepare themselves to treat your time as valuable.
This story gets reposted on HN quite often, and makes it to the front page.
Several things don't add up in it.
The author claims that code was copied but I looked at both repos and they share no code at all. [0] [1]
In his article, the author claims that " If I were the patenting type, this would be the thing you would patent. ps. I don't regret not patenting anything."
That's really not how patents work, and looking at the repo, a second year CS student could do the same really. I don't see anything that could remotely be patented. It reads where to find the installer from a config file and determine what to do based on an enum.
He himself goes on to say he tried replicating the user experience from several existing package managers available on Linux. And Microsoft did create Nuget 12 years prior to AppGet. I’ll give some leeway to the author since I don’t think the author ever filed for a patent so he might not be familiar with the concept of prior art.
Throughout the article the author uses the term acqui-hire but it seems Microsoft was simply considering him for a PM position (and he failed the interview). There's nothing to acquire since there's no patent, no IP and no brand. Only a registered domain and what seems like an anemic userbase, if any.
I’ve done acqui-hires in the past and that’s not what the author describes. First you never deal with HR, there’s no regular interview (especially not at a hiring event and with other candidate present) and there’s always a contract. I get that the author isn’t really in a tier one market so he might not be familiar with how it’s done (or maybe customs are different where he’s from?) but what should have tipped him is that he never spoke to anyone from legal about licenses, only to an engineer who then referred him to HR…
However, the author is quite clever. Being featured in The Verge[0] and on HN's front page will probably bring a lot more eyeballs to the startups he's trying to promote. So congratulation to him for the free advertising!
He never claims that his code was copied - just that they used the same approach and a lot of similar patterns.
Regardless of what happened, it sounds like they left him hanging without even the courtesy of a follow-up email. Going from being ghosted to having MS release their own version of your OSS project after they've asked you a lot of technical details about how it works would leave a sour taste in anyone's mouth.
Most people don't get acquihired, so I don't blame him for not understanding how it works (nor is he from the states). What he's really talking about is being hired to keep working on AppGet, he's not talking about having the project itself acquired (since it's an OSS license).
I doubt there was intentional malice here but they really screwed up in how they communicated with him, and that can't help encourage devs to work on the windows ecosystem.
> Going from being ghosted to having MS release their own version of your OSS project after they've asked you a lot of technical details about how it works would leave a sour taste in anyone's mouth.
I don't think they asked him a lot. The code was all there, and WinGet doesn't share anything with it.
To me, it sounds like he failed his PM interview. That's why they stopped talking to him.
Yeah this is a learning lesson no doubt. Management of a company can never put up with a person who isn't 100% under their control. Only the top 0.001% of developers will get away with that. Better to realize they want what you have and you have to figure out some way to get a handle on that or realize like this poor guy in a year some internal team has copied what you did and they have 100x the resources that you have.
I remember reading this when it was first posted and sensing that there was some disconnect between the author and Microsoft.
The reframing of the hiring as not part of a wider career at Microsoft seems exactly as it sounds - "ok, you don't have to do the stuff we've suggested ... But we still want AppGet".
And then this:
> We talked about some of our options, but in general, I thought everything went well.
It's quite clear that it didn't go that well, isn't it?
I'm not defending Microsoft here or suggesting that this was the exact outcome the author was seeking, but I sense a bit of naivety in interpreting what Microsoft were driving towards.
Ultimately they clearly decided the effort of a grounds up redesign / rewrite was more valuable than bring him along for the ride.
Apache. And winget-cli is licensed under the MIT license. So although the licenses are incompatible, the end result would have been the same even if Microsoft had simply forked winget with the Apache license, although in that case they would have had to credit the original author, and the lack of credit is the original author's main issue with how this was handled.
Don't know about the cloning of his product, but in terms of negotiation: Don't let yourself get strung along just because someone waves something you want in front of your face.
It's absolutely vital in any negotiation that you set boundaries and that you are are willing to walk away if those boundaries aren't respected. Especially if you really want what they are offering.
In all, it seems the ball spent a lot of the time in their court, and not a lot in his. Either they want the guy or they don't, he shouldn't have to spend months jumping through hoops for the position if they are legitimately interested in his work.
It kinda reads like a Nigeria scam: Just give us one more month and you'll get the money, I swear. It's tied up with customs right now, so if you could just do this one thing...
Whatever bureaucracy they have to deal with is entirely their problem, not his. This tedious non-committal nonsense is not something you should tolerate from anyone. Sure if it's a 2 person startup things may not be smooth, but this is Microsoft we're talking about. They should have their shit together more than that.
Within the general context of someone offering you a position based on your work, they have the privilege of talking to you and should be expected to treat you at least like a peer and not like some random job applicant desperate to get hired.
I don't mean to suggest you should be a diva about it, but that you should respect yourself and be willing to say no to anyone who doesn't.
Don’t ever forget that at its core Microsoft is still the same company we grew up with. Just because they’re singing sweet songs now doesn’t mean they’re fundamentally different.
I know that there are a lot of developers on here that disagree with me and are all in on the ‘new’ Microsoft. I can’t change your mind. Ive watched Microsoft since the early 90s though and they’ve never really changed—-and buying GitHub and releasing some things as open source doesn’t change things a bit.
Just because they’re singing sweet songs now doesn’t mean they’re fundamentally different.
Frankly I think it's only because Google, Facebook, et al. invented new kinds of evil too fast for Microsoft to keep up that they seemed warm and fuzzy at all. They're still the company that force-upgraded users to Windows 10, and they're still the company that's requiring you to have a Microsoft account for future versions of Windows 11.
And they are the company that bought Skype, forced me to create Microsoft accounts and then mess things up, now they boutght Minecraft and I just receive an ultimatum to switch my Mojang account to a Microsoft account.
F U MS, can't you let me login with existing shit,.
On a different topic, I am using some MS APIs at work (TTS stuff) and my impression of this MS products is bad, it feels like different teams that hate each other were forced to work on this shit and some other team is forced to cover it up with documentation. I don't recommend MS stuff if you have alternatives.
What are you talking about? Microsoft's Text-To-Speech APIs are the best on the market. Google's are definitely a distant second: not as many languages, not as many voices, and the output is nowhere near as good. After those two, there isn't really anything left worth mentioning.
I am talking about they have one documentation but if you look deeper there are 2 products, thay say here are 2 options long and short API ,
but look closer and see one uses names like "Name", "Voice" the other "name", "voice" , the list of voices of this 2 options are not the same , and you randomly get weird errors with shit message that will solve themselves in the next few days. If my memory is correct you authenticate in2 different ways.
So I would prefer MS do this;
1 this is our 2 completly different and incompatible APIs , they might look similar but are not the same, outpiut can differ even if you send same params to each one
2 give me good error messages, like if is your fault a request fails make it clear , if is my input the problem make it clear it is me and what is wrong
I mean, there's the old Windows-only SAPI from the Windows XP days that they haven't been developing for several years now, and the current Azure Cognitive Services, which is just a REST API with a pretty standard auth scheme. There's an official .NET package for wrapping that REST API, but it's certainly not necessary to use it if you know how to handle REST APIs. Is that what you're talking about?
Yes, the Azure API, there are 2 different things under the hood, the short and login APIs, that are different names, different auth headers, different voices supported, voices with same name that have different styles supported. Bad errors messages that popup and get fixed in a few days but only on one of the APIs. The issue is that I am trying to combine the short and long APIs in one product and I am hitting this big inconsistencies, I see lcearly there are 2 teams and do things different , if you use only one section you have a completly different experience.
Edit. I do the REST calls directly, not via an SDK and use the documentation from MS for the REST API so no SDK documentation or SDK code that hides the issues.
Microsoft's Text-To-Speech APIs are the best on the market.
Wow, I had no idea they were that good. Is there a way to get at them from a consumer level? For example, there are plenty of e-reader apps that use Google's TTS to read epub books as audiobooks. Anything similar for Microsoft or is it all on the developer side?
I don't understand this complaint. You want separate logins for every service? You can't even argue that there are privacy issues - these are now all part of the same company.
Separate logins incur a cost to both the service operator (who has to run multiple secure identity systems, build multiple 2FA systems, manage multiple customer service teams, etc) and the client (who has to remember multiple passwords). Consolidation of identity services is natural. One secure login is better than dozens of insecure ones.
Before you yell "password manager" admit that the average person doesn't even know what a password manager is. "Every user changes their workflow" is not a practical solution.
In long: I want separate logins for different domains. In no universe should Minecraft share a login service with Azure cloud engineering. And I shouldn't have to log in to use offline applications locally. And teams should support different logins for many accounts, like Slack figured out ages ago. By forcing changes to the login pattern for negligible to negative consumer benefit, it's clear Microsoft continues to be broken.
Microsoft and login services are terrible, and uniting them under one login to rule them all doesn't help.
You can create as many Microsoft logins as you like. If you want to separate Minecraft and Azure, go ahead. But there's no reason this requires separate authentication technology or infrastructure.
>But there's no reason this requires separate authentication technology or infrastructure.
Only if you are Microsoft replacing working login system with a new one costs zero.
But as a user you have no reason to change and many reasons not to do it, especially if you experienced already issues from the Skype account migration issue and you seen the news where giants ban your account for shitty reasons , so now I might lose my MS account access if my son somehow gets banned in Minecraft.
But you will say is more beautiful from an engineering POV to have one account to rule them all, my response is that is not as easy, I might already have 2 Skype accounts, 2 Minececraft accounts and 1 MS account that I use(MS might have created some other ones behind my back), it is ugly not beautifull.
What would have been beautiful maybe would have been from those smart devs to keep the old email and password login work and move their login server to Azure ,Windows and .Net if they are allergic to whatever Mojang uses, that is beautifull when dev changes help the users or don't screw with themn, changes that help devs are just for dev ego.
I don't really care, but I can only imagine that your opinion of what is "beautiful" doesn't carry much weight with the folks that have to build and maintain this shit.
The shit is already built, they need a system admin to keep it running.
If those devs were smart enough they could do this transition transparently , you could continue login with your email/password but for some reason management wants this, this is someone project , instead of creating something new and good they move shit around.
It's a shame the people you say are working to maintain the infrastructure are so disconnected from the users that they are satisfied with it being, to quote, "shit."
I'm talking about using your PC, not logging into Microsoft's online services. Using the same account for Microsoft's possessions like Xbox and Minecraft and Skype makes sense. That's fine. But you know something? Microsoft doesn't own my god damned computer.
This is a lame excuse, say what after the forced account migration is my pourchase invalid? Will Microsoft just drop the db table with my purchase and logins? Will they refuse to migrate people after?
No, they have to keep all that data and confirm even 2 years from now that I paid for this game and migrate my logins ,
Tell me know what is more expensive
1 Keep the Mojang logins for Java edition. do nothing
2 Write ton of code to force migrate Java edition players into the XBox ,Microsoft accounts.
It is not lke I can play from Linux PC with an XBox person multiplayer so there is Zero benefit for me, just some mangers and develoeprs at MS getting busy.
They fucked up my skype account move so this is why I don't like when they are trying to move me to their shit account, Now what? when they block my MS account I lose Skype and Minecraft too?
Ah yes, the old "you had a Microsoft account you didn't know about so when we merged the two any contacts you didn't have on both accounts were permanently erased" trick. Happened to me.
Yeah, people like to block off parts of their life. It's not really that hard to manage accounts with password managers and saved sessions. Microsoft doesn't need to have everything at their greedy little fingertips to data mine.
Well in my book the order is still something like Google < M$ < Facebook < Amazon when it comes to "evilness". Not sure where I would rank Apple on that scale (and I also don't use Apple products a lot), so I left them out.
About Windows 11: I switched my home desktop PC to Linux when I upgraded it early last year. I still have Windows 8 lying around mostly unused on a partition, but since it's a 32 bit version I would have to do a complete reinstall, and most of the software I'm using (including most games, thanks to Steam) runs just fine on Linux, so I haven't worked up the motivation to do it yet. And stories like this don't really increase my urge to install Windows...
> Well in my book the order is still something like Google < M$ < Facebook < Amazon when it comes to "evilness".
I find this an interesting order to think about. Amazon has directly lead to fatalities and ( I would describe as ) an abusive work environment, but Facebook I would say has done more harm on a larger "societal shift" scale.
I suppose just looking at direct consequences of actions, I agree with your assessment - Amazon knowingly builds itself of labor abuse, and Facebook can at least lie to themselves.
> requiring you to have a Microsoft account for future versions of Windows 11.
How quickly people forgot about mandatory iTunes activation...
> They're still the company that force-upgraded users to Windows 10
This is response for all those cries what MS should take the security of the OS seriously. No wonder what after a decade of disabled Windows Update on the endpoints (to conserve resources, to not to receive WPA update so a pirated copy would continue to work, so it wouldn't waste the precious Internet traffic and bunch of other ridiculous reasons) they took the forced approach.
I would've been one of those people, if I'd ever had a security breach. At this point I've been saved so much time and hassle not putting up with Microsoft's nonsense I could spend a month dealing with a stolen identity and I'd still come out on top. Of course I'm not one of the numpties that runs untrusted JS in my browser or installs rando programs.
> Of course I'm not one of the numpties that runs untrusted JS in my browser or installs rando programs.
You, as the other people in this thread, are forgetting/don't think what 90% of the Windows userbase struggle to distinguish between a click and a double click.
Personally I'm not fond on how and where MS directs Windows for the last 8 years, but it's becames totally understandable when you take the sheer number (and ignorance/stupidity) of the userbase.
Did macOS ever have mandatory activation? Because I have used it for a long time and have never needed that. You need some way to get a new OS version, which was buying a new macOS version on a disk (back in the day), then on the app store, and then it was a free upgrade from the app store. But you never needed an account to run the actual OS.
Just a nit: I fully agree with you that deep inside, Microsoft is still as evil as in the past (competition forced them to hide it a bit better is all). But I'm still all in on the `new’ Microsoft. I don't think these two necessarily exclude each other.
I mean the alternatives are Linux, which I haven't the patience for, or Apple which is also evil but just in different ways.
There are still a few of us who remember; I've tried posting responses here when the Nadella Kool-Aid gets too thick. But on the whole, kids nowadays -- even on here -- are far too easily impressed by superficial "Internet and Open Source-friendly" bling-bling BS.
I've read this several times before, and every time I do it hurts just as much.
Every time I read of another person who built something useful, so much so that it gets recognised by big-corp X, and being called in by Google or Microsoft, promised the recognition (and pay) they deserve, then having the rug pulled at light-speed from under them, I take it personally.
I'm amazed, every time I read "The Day AppGet Died" at the restraint shown, which makes it hurt that little bit more.
Keivan should probably be a (multi) millionaire now, sitting comfortably with his family doing whatever it is they enjoy doing. Instead, someone at Microsoft used this as a way to get themselves a promotion.
Don't be fooled by the lipstick, Microsoft has never stopped being EEEvil.
> Keivan should probably be a (multi) millionaire now, sitting comfortably with his family doing whatever it is they enjoy doing. Instead, someone at Microsoft used this as a way to get themselves a promotion.
To be fair, AppGet was never really that popular, and Microsoft's replacement is even less so. I'd be surprised if anyone got a promotion based on their WinGet work. There has been no significant adoption of WinGet in the market. They're lucky Microsoft doesn't dissolve the team. We use Chocolatey instead, which I think is more popular (but still not very popular).
I have no horse in the race, nor do I know anything special about this situation, but it's fairly clear to me that the author failed the interview. I don't know if he understands that and is trying to downplay it, or if he doesn't realize that's what happened. That's why everything dried up after the interview, and why the followup says the position "didn't work out."
> I'd be surprised if anyone got a promotion based on their WinGet work. There has been no significant adoption of WinGet in the market.
Because it's an terrible implementation of a package management. Don't get me wrong, it's better than nothing but still...
For instance:
- we can't pin packages (there's an open issue for God knows how long) Problem with that is that if you do "winget upgrade --all" it will upgrade all your programs even those that you don't want to upgrade. The alternative is simply upgrading one by one.
- Some programs have a problem with their version (GOG Galaxy for instance). Winget simply doesn’t know that there’s no newer version available and keep trying to upgrade everytime you do “winget upgrade –all”. This, in turn, make the previous point more annoying as I can’t say to winget ignore “GOG Galaxy” and upgrade all the other packages.
- Some programs are downloaded from websites that are probably heavily throttling downloads from winget, this make downloading qbittorrent (20mb) takes a LONG time and usually failing.
I have no idea of how to fix these issues as I'm just a user but there's a stark difference between using windows winget and apt or pacman.
> Some programs have a problem with their version (GOG Galaxy for instance). Winget simply doesn’t know that there’s no newer version available and keep trying to upgrade everytime you do “winget upgrade –all”. This, in turn, make the previous point more annoying as I can’t say to winget ignore “GOG Galaxy” and upgrade all the other packages.
This was resolved in the latest preview release (well, the PR merged a couple months ago, but they seem to release once every million years). If you want to upgrade to preview temporarily it will still automatically update to stable releases.
> Problem with that is that if you do "winget upgrade --all" it will upgrade all your programs even those that you don't want to upgrade. The alternative is simply upgrading one by one.
Well, TBF, that's exactly what "winget upgrade --all" sounds like it should do.
Every Linux package manager that I use have an option to hold one or more packages from upgrading. It’s common sense that one or more piece of software might break on update and the user should be able to hold it until a fix arrive. Even arch where it’s heavily discouraged to do partial upgrades have an option to pin packages.
What winget upgrade —-all *should* do is to follow this common sense and do a upgrade all /minus package that the user choose not to upgrade.
Admittedly I don't have any experience with this sort of thing, but I have always read it as; Microsoft want his work, they should have just paid him X million for it, or paid him to keep working on it.
Instead, they made it into some sort of interview, got all of his input then went off and copy-paste'd the code (an exaggeration) into WinGet and ghosted him.
To add insult to injury he got a nice little "fuck you" the day before they released it.
winget is protected as it's providing the API for the Microsoft Store to manage Win32 apps. I think there's been a decent amount of adoption, there's lots of install pages (Git is one I noticed recently) that have winget install right next to brew install.
They also don't really promote it as far as I can tell. I didn't find out about it until I was looking up some stuff about choco. It's terrible what they did to this guy. I know he shared his stuff as open source but still to string him along for over a year whilst also having a team working on what he had built and barely acknowledging it or helping him out in some way.
> it's fairly clear to me that the author failed the interview.
What's important here is how he "failed the interview": He was probably never going to pass it. They'd already "failed" him beforehand for being an Open Source freak; the whole charade was just to string him along.
Microsoft employs many people that are open-source advocates. Someone's perspective on that would not impact their status in an interview.
If anything, the reason feedback took forever to him was because someone may have asked for an exception to the interview failure so they could hire him. Large companies are behemoths and things do go wrong, mistakes are made, and Microsoft did own up to it in this case (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/winget-install-le...) but open source did not play a part in it.
Source: myself, I worked at Microsoft in a past life and did many interviews. No one cares about someone's stance on open source anymore.
> it's fairly clear to me that the author failed the interview
I’m not so sure. The interview could have been a pretense to get more information, e.g. strategy for future development.
Also, in a sufficiently machiavellian environment, candidates can easily “fail” interviews by just seeming smarter than the hiring manager, scaring that manager into thinking they’ll be leapfrogged.
Kinda reminds me of the whole Flicktype debacle. Pretty much every company of a certain size has their fair share of bad management and traitorous corporate ladder-climbers. We, the users, are powerless to stop this.
Microsoft - You have many alternatives to Microsoft software. Linux, Libre Office, Java, Python, IntelliJ, ... pick one, or more.
Amazon - there are so many other stores. And cloud providers if you are into that.
Netflix - just another streaming service. You can decide how to consume media in many different ways.
Google - Mail you can host anywhere, it's not like Gmail is special. Online productivity suites are not that rare as once. If you insist on Youtube you can use it without an account, Android with fake account.
If you find yourself you can't switch, you are into much bigger trouble. It's ok to be burned once, but next time you start you new SaaS startup, think twice do you want to depend on specific company for all your needs.
Out of those I only have Google, even though I use it only for spam e-mails these days, having opted for Protonmail for the real stuff. The only reason I still have a Google Account is that my Pinephone Pro hasn't arrived yet. Once I get it and figure out it fills my most critical needs, the Google account gets shredded too.
Giving up on Netflix and Spotify was much less difficult than expected.
Well. Cold reality is that even 5-year old kids know what sort of company MSFT is and what sort of people work for them. He acted like an useful fool, got treated like one. I even smirked a bit at his misery, even though I am normally not that kind of person.
Had he instead reacted to the phone call with some extremely aggressive licensing, maybe even a software patent, now he would be discussing the terms of the out of court settlement and choosing a color for individual seats in his new 7-series.
Is it still low when it is self-inflicted? That old fable with the finisher at the end about 'you knew me for what I was when you picked me up' comes to mind. This ending was clear from the beginning.
Microsoft is the same company who licensed Mosaic from Spyglass with the promise of a quarterly fee plus royalties and then released their version of the browser as Internet Explorer for free resulting in no royalties. Never mind the history of companies who got in bed with Microsoft and never quite recovered afterwards. Or the history of blatant ripoffs. DoubleSpace anyone?
Anyone choosing to get in bed with Microsoft at this point gets what they deserve. There was a reason why they were literally paying companies to write apps for Windows Phone.
As far as knowing about the workings of a company, I'd definitely bet on the college student. The observation in my other comment applies to general adults as well.
Ok I'll stop taking the joke too seriously now :P .
College students have spent much longer being indoctrinated that corporations are good, and the bigger the better, than have five-year-olds. In that sense the joke actually was -- at least to some small part -- serious.
I don’t get why he was so upset about it. Microsoft didn’t want to accept his offer. But still WinGet is not as good as AppGet. So if he just had kept going his way with AppGet, maybe WinGet would have never gotten any traction. Like a lot of projects, Microsoft more or less abandoned WinGet right away. You still can’t do „winget update“ and update all your installed packages. For me one of the main features of a package manager.
It’s the stringing along that makes my blood boil. After reading things like this, I’m thinking, what I’d do differently?
Maybe have them reimburse all my travel upfront. No money, no meetings.
Also, bill all the meetings and conversations. Up front, given their reputation from this story. They want to spend my time, better show how serious they are. No money, no meetings, no false hopes.
But they know young geeks can be excited that someone at THE Microsoft noticed them, like in the Hollywood success stories, and walk an extra mile. Who knows, I could have lost my shit 20 years ago. This straight up exploitation irks me to no end. Reminds me of rock stars bedding teenage fangirls and similar shit, maybe this is why.