Reporting from Paul Thurrott… this is a new low for Microsoft
This is super shitty MS… you better unf*ck this…
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At the risk of being an apologist here - can we at least give Microsoft the opportunity to respond? I think given their recent track record - especially under Nadella’s stewardship, the company has exhibited far better behavior. At the very least - I am willing to wait and see how they respond to this.
Now - if their response is essentially worthless, or if their response is easily disproven, then I am all for crucifying them.
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When you read the 14 standard comments on Paul’s post, it seems clear there is another side to this story. Does anyone honestly think Microsoft will provide any further clarity? In the grand scheme of things this doesn’t seem like something Microsoft would spend any more time on and this will be forgotten about in a few more blog cycles.
Yes, this is not a new idea. There are dozens of such products out there on Linux that have been doing this for decades. There are also several similar products for Windows, which are newer.
The question is, how much had they already written, before they spoke to Beigi. Also, why didn’t they employ him? Because they had “stolen” his idea, or because they use C++ and he only does C#? There may be legitimate reasons, but his side of the story sounds pretty damming.
I’ll be interested to see what Microsoft have to say in their defence.
Their defence will probably be in line with their defence during the historic “Windows Refund Day”.
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Or maybe they won’t even acknowledge that they did anything untoward:
Yes, they haven’t cleared up the situation at all, it is still as murky as before.
We still only have Beigi’s word, that Microsoft screwed him over and there statement neither confirms nor denied the story.
Ahh good ol Microsoft returns!!!
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We do not know what really happened. And, you can’t believe pretty much anything you read anymore. So, who knows…
Since both AppGet & WinGet are open source, a comparison of the source code from the two projects will show if Microsoft stole code from AppGet.
I’m guessing Microsoft is confident that a code inspection will reveal that they did NOT steal any code. As to the basic command line UI & architecture, I’m also guessing it would be just as applicable to say that AppGet stole those from the multitude of package managers that have existed for many decades in the *nix world.
I don’t have time right now to do it but in case anyone else wants to look, here are links to the repo’s.
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They’re open source, so I don’t think the issue is about code theft… you can’t steal something that is freely given away. The issue is that they acted in bad faith, stringing him on through a job interview process (including, apparently time spent extracting his ideas and approaches to the problem) with no apparent intention to ever actually follow through on the job they offered. Then, on top of that, they barely gave him any credit for his involvement when, by the accounts of others, they based their approach pretty much directly on his ideas.
I agree Microsoft owes him an apology for their bad faith - but it’s all open source. They could gather all the “inspiration” required for a package manager by reviewing any number of open source package managers. I don’t think that a package manager is novel enough to warrant any outrage.
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