I can say I’m a bit upset on your behalf. Actually acquiring the code would have cost Microsoft very little money, would have ended up with a better product and also would have brought along the current user space in a very graceful manner.
They didn’t even need to acquire - MIT license means they could just fork it and use it as they preferred, keeping his name in the About screen that nobody reads. But it would have looked bad.
There's no common code between the projects; they're not even written in the same language. It's hard to say it's a "fork". They both just use yaml manifest files on GitHub as a registry (which could be good for appget! It should be easier to set it up as a trusted package registry with verified non-malicious packages!). That's the commonality. I'm not sure we should grant monopoly on _broad architure choices_ when software patents are already considered so toxic. And appget _did_ at least get a callout in the release announcement, so it _was_ mentioned as an inspiration, in the same breath as chocolatey and others...
The meat of this blog post, to me, seems like the terrible hiring pipeline with no feedback. That seems like a really bad experience. I can only imagine that someone really dropped a ball somewhere.
Nobody talked about granting monopoly, it's just about common courtesy really. They basically strung him along before cloning his tool in the dark, when they could have done it in the open in various different ways. After the failed hire, just give him a heads-up like "hey, we really like your stuff but for various reasons we can't hire you and we need to rewrite it, what about we make this manifest a bit of a common standard? We'll credit you for that", and then everyone is happy.
Presumably they wanted to keep control of copyright, although their claim on their website is that otherwise they "couldn't build a repository of trusted applications ".
It reminds me of the way secure boot was rolled out where Microsoft said that this was all about "trust" and yet OEMs who are always keen to keep Microsoft sweet would strangely only bundle windows keys.
I wonder if things would have been different, if the product was licensed under Gplv3. If so, he could demand to check if Microsoft violated the license https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-violation.en.html (to check if this is a completely new rewrite for example).
Update: Ah looks like Winget was sourced in C++, and Appget is in C#
Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. (Pretty much my maxim).
They could have approached the project owner, said they'd like to use the structure under the MIT license and offered a job/cash as a thank you for his dev time.
They could at least send the guy a fish, if his contribution was significant.
