When you release free (as in freedom) software, you are not entitled to revenue sharing when people use or modify that software, or if people use the ideas in that software to make new, from-scratch software.
I think Microsoft is a terrible organization and will rejoice the day they finally cease to exist as a concern, but they didn’t do anything wrong here.
PHP didn’t “rip off” Perl, nor did CoffeeScript “rip off” ruby. All the other PoW or PoS blockchains didn’t “rip off” Satoshi.
He needs to stop seeing ideas and concepts as “his” that are property that can be stolen.
Why should they acquihire when they can just reimplement?
Ideas aren’t property, and if you have a good idea, and someone else takes it and runs with it and makes software used by millions that works better than if you hadn’t had that idea, that is the system working as intended, and, ultimately, his ideas, now published and infecting the world, being writ large and used by humans.
I’m not some corporate apologist, but he should be proud. (He also probably should have, back when, started a company designed to be digestible that they could have acquired, if he wanted to participate financially, like MySQL or RedHat did.)
While I haven’t read the announcement from Microsoft, it seems to me that the core issues he had were in the downplaying of AppGet and overall lack of attribution, compared to other package managers with less influence:
> But the part that hurts the most was the announcement. AppGet, which is objectively where most ideas for WinGet came from, was only mentioned as another package manager that just happened to exist; While other package managers that WinGet shares very little with were mentioned and explained much more deliberately.
He also mentions that he would’ve appreciated better communication. It doesn’t seem to have been about being “entitled to revenue sharing”. He divorced himself from that completely:
> Am I upset they didn’t hire me? Not really, after visiting the campus, I wasn’t too sure I wanted to work for such a big company, also moving from Canada to the U.S. wasn’t something I was too excited about.
And
> I didn’t create AppGet to get rich or to become famous or get hired by Microsoft.
He needs to stop seeing ideas and concepts as “his” that are property that can be stolen.
Where do you see that in the post? His pretty reasonable expectations are a bit of common decency from the other side - following up on emails and a smidgen of credit. There's no entitlement to ideas or claims anything was stolen.
Taking someone all the way through the interview process, then ghosting them, is doing something wrong.
Add in the fact that they had planned on buying his app outright told him they would hire him instead to speed up the process, and it's an especially crummy thing to do.
I’m not sure I agree with that. No news is the equivalent of all other times: no deal/no hire. I think the game theoretic optimal choice from a liability standpoint is to simply stop sending further messages if you decide not to do business with someone, especially given all of the current litigation-happy people there are out there these days. (Even if you win a suit, you lose lots of money.)
It avoids the possibility of obsessive types getting agitated over an explicit rejection, et c. Anyone clever will see ghosting for what it plainly is: an explicit rejection.
It’s just business, not some trusted friend ghosting you on lunch plans and not calling. This is how business works, and it’s not rude, it’s just the protocol.
I think Microsoft is a terrible organization and will rejoice the day they finally cease to exist as a concern, but they didn’t do anything wrong here.
PHP didn’t “rip off” Perl, nor did CoffeeScript “rip off” ruby. All the other PoW or PoS blockchains didn’t “rip off” Satoshi.
He needs to stop seeing ideas and concepts as “his” that are property that can be stolen.
Why should they acquihire when they can just reimplement?
Ideas aren’t property, and if you have a good idea, and someone else takes it and runs with it and makes software used by millions that works better than if you hadn’t had that idea, that is the system working as intended, and, ultimately, his ideas, now published and infecting the world, being writ large and used by humans.
I’m not some corporate apologist, but he should be proud. (He also probably should have, back when, started a company designed to be digestible that they could have acquired, if he wanted to participate financially, like MySQL or RedHat did.)