[alias_neo]

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.

[electroly]

> 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."

[arepublicadoceu]

> 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.

[easton]

> 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.

https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/releases/tag/v1.3.43...

https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/pull/1765

[CRConrad]

> 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.

[arepublicadoceu]

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.

[alias_neo]

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.

[easton]

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.

[electroly]

That's an interesting bit about the Microsoft Store; I didn't know that. Thanks!

[stjohnswarts]

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.

[CRConrad]

> 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.

[intern4tional]

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.

[aranchelk]

> 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.

[smoldesu]

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.

[fartcannon]

What? You have all the power. You send an email and then stop buying their services.

'To whom it concerns, you guys are shitty so I'm cancelling services.'

[smoldesu]

Sure, just delete your iCloud account, Microsoft account, Amazon account, Netflix account and Google account. It's so easy that anyone could do it!

[tut-urut-utut]

iCloud - you don't really need an alternative.

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.

[luciusdomitius]

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.

[fartcannon]

It really is that easy.

[luciusdomitius]

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.

[jjoonathan]

Yes, that's an important takeaway, but

> I even smirked a bit at his misery

smirking at someone for getting rolled is low.

[bacchusracine]

>smirking at someone for getting rolled is low.

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.

[Shared404]

> Cold reality is that even 5-year old kids know what sort of company MSFT is and what sort of people work for them.

Mate, 80% of college students don't know that.

Source: Work at a computer repair shop and see shocked faces.

[CRConrad]

Then again most five-year-olds seem smarter than most college students.

[Shared404]

I dunno.

They're both larval stages, just different ones.

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 .

[CRConrad]

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.

[jmcgough]

How is he going to take out a patent for or aggressively license OSS? The code is already out for anyone to use at that point.