Saying that it’s just “a big company thing” is giving Microsoft a pass here. Look at their recent PR: wanting to embrace the developer community [1], their love of open source [2], etc. While AppGet may be an isolated story, I’m inclined to believe that MSFT is simply acting they way they’ve always have — by embracing, by extending, and by extinguishing.
Microsoft doesn't let any open source build of VS Code access the VS Code Marketplace. Heavily reduces the benefit of VS Code being open source when you can't use any extension or service built for it without building it yourself.
What happened to AppGet is not what embrace, extend, extinguish means. This strategy refers to writing software compatible with existing dominant software surrounding some shared interop (e.g. a file format they can both read, web standards they both implement, a networking protocol so they can communicate with eachother, etc), gaining market dominance, then making your once compatible software incompatible. Absolutely none of this happened with AppGet.
Yeah, that's exactly what I had in mind. Microsoft had a very specific modus operandi in their bad old days, that was different then what they did with AppGet. Here they basically acted like a regular big company trampling over a small company. You'd be hard-pressed to find any big company that hasn't done that. I remember, for example, when Google created 'Go' lang, they didn't care that there was an existing programming language named 'Go!'[1]
Kind of. The difference is that AppGet is open source with no patents - so what they did was legal and, you might say, within ethical boundaries (except for the way they treated Keivan by stringing him along and then ghosting him) - though I could be persuaded that it isn't ethical for a trillion-dollar company to simply copy an existing open-source project, without some sort of voluntary compensation.
I agree there is a strong embrace here. And that's usually good. Another alternative is neglect.
Microsoft has unusual ability to move swiftly, with all its weight it may be not graceful. That said they do not always extend and extinguish. Often they make clone and ride it
Oracle => MSSQL
Java => C#
AWS => Azure
To make objective decision it would be nice to have a list of Microsoft inspirations with their fate and Microsoft actions.
1. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/micro...
2. https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/18/21262103/microsoft-open-s...