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.
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!
[0] https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli
[1] https://github.com/appget/appget
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/28/21272964/microsoft-winget...