Top all-time · #3032
K
Keivan Beigi
Personal blog · keivan.ioprogrammingbusiness
Keivan Beigi's personal blog at keivan.io covers programming and business. Since 2020, 25 different Hacker News readers have linked it 29 times, most often “The Day AppGet Died”. The last post was in 2020, but the archive is still widely read.
29mentions?
25HN people?
2020–2025first – last linked?
Too few sampled comments (23) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for the AppGet developer's own account of Microsoft's WinGet resembling AppGet and the lack of credit. It is cited as a source whenever Microsoft copying or credit comes up.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 23 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Open Source Developer, Consultant at Polyfill Software, Founder of AppGet, Sonarr.
Most-linked posts?
- The Day AppGet Died21 people · 25 mentions · first linked 2020-05-26
- /appget-what-chocolatey-wasnt/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-05-28
What Hacker News says?
Not disagreeing with you, but I think it's better to make it a little bit more clear what exactly was copied. Reading the article mentioned in the OP, the main selling point for appget seems to be that the packages are written in yaml: > Do you want to know how Microsoft WinGet works? go read the article ( https://keivan.io/appget-what-chocolatey-wasnt/ ) But that alone doesn't particularly strike me as a completely…
Comment linking /appget-what-chocolatey-wasnt/
on “The Day AppGet Died”Submitted The Day AppGet Died as a story · 1930 points
HN discussionAuthor here, Because it's sure to come up here is a comment I wrote on Reddit that clarifies somethings, I haven't updated the original article since I'm not sure what the etiquette for updating a highly shared article is. ------ Code being copied isn't an issue. I knew full well what it meant to release something opensource and I don't regret it one bit. What was copied with no credit is the foundation of the proje…
Comment linking /appget-what-chocolatey-wasnt/
on “The Day AppGet Died”Submitted The Day AppGet Died (2020) as a story · 227 points
HN discussionThis is not the first or last time this has happened. Microsoft does it intentionally and when they get caught they then give a fake apology and pretend it was a mistake. These mistakes keep happening and the pattern is always the same, MS teams engaging with a developer to learn all about their business idea and then they steal it: https://keivan.io/the-day-appget-died/
Comment linking /the-day-appget-died/
on “Getting forked by Microsoft”Submitted The day app get died as a story · 7 points
HN discussion> Microsoft being the cool guys phase is slowly over I'm going to re-post something that I wrote in 2022: I'm a bit surprised at how many of my friends have jumped ship to Visual Studio Code, including those who are very much for free software. They have always been in the business of embrace, extend, extinguish[0]. People tend to forget how evil M$ used to be because recently they have seemed like a beacon for Open…
Comment linking /the-day-appget-died/
on “GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation”Submitted The Day AppGet Died as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI don't know if you're aware of other not-that-ancient incidents like these? https://keivan.io/the-day-appget-died/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180715225433/https://threadrea... It took significant public outrage and press coverage before either of those were even acknowledged, a long time after. > What were the chances that Microsoft was openly doing that? After reading the above, is it really that edgy to be ass…
Comment linking /the-day-appget-died/
on “Microsoft forked MIT licensed repo and changed the copyright [fixed]”Submitted The Day AppGet Died (2020) as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> Microsoft Process Explorer has the same functionality so they don't have standing to block competitors then go and include the exact same features in their own software. > Microsoft has been secretly adding more powerful features than Process Hacker via their SAC product – SAC has no security whatsoever by design – they're clearly targeting the project not because of any actual technical issues but rather because…
Comment linking /the-day-appget-died/
on “Microsoft no longer signs Windows drivers for Process Hacker”Just linking to the original story of appget vs winget: https://keivan.io/the-day-appget-died/
Comment linking /the-day-appget-died/
on “Growl in Retirement”Your "Microsoft <3's open source" mentality is also out of date[1][2][3]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28975856 [2] https://keivan.io/the-day-appget-died/ [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28794352
Comment linking /the-day-appget-died/
on “Google Chromium, sans integration with Google”> nay, even allegations The allegation is right there. His blog. Which I quoted from. But didn't link to, so sorry, here it is https://keivan.io/the-day-appget-died/
Comment linking /the-day-appget-died/
on “Microsoft now credits maker of AppGet but offers no apology”This seems more in the realm of poorly managed expectations and less intentional and malicious copying. After reading his original blog post[0] I felt like they were originally interested in acquiring his software, but decided to go in a different direction with it and just weren't transparent about that decision at the time. It's not like they had to talk to him, the code is literally open sourced. There's definite…
Comment linking /the-day-appget-died/
on “Microsoft now credits maker of AppGet but offers no apology”> They cannot legally admit they looked at his code and copied the structure, because that opens them up to a copyright suit. AppGet is released under Apache License 2.0, Winget under MIT, I'm not sure how copyright would be an issue. AppGet's author addresses that point here https://keivan.io/the-day-appget-died/#edit-to-clarify-some-...
Comment linking /the-day-appget-died/
on “Microsoft now credits maker of AppGet but offers no apology”>>I am curious: why would I want to use AppGet or WinGet instead of Chocolatey?<< https://keivan.io/appget-what-chocolatey-wasnt/
Comment linking /appget-what-chocolatey-wasnt/
on “Microsoft now credits maker of AppGet but offers no apology”Homebrew is a package manager. Windows has its own package manager: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/package-manager/ I guess MSI isn't a panacea after all. Here is a not so savory story on how winget came to be: https://keivan.io/the-day-appget-died/
Comment linking /the-day-appget-died/
on “What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)”Looking at https://keivan.io/the-day-appget-died/ and https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/milestone/5 (seven months late and that's just 0.3) with a nod at https://i.imgur.com/gADLhSW.jpg I'd say someone recognized the lack of package managers at Microsoft and various underlings came up with solutions. One was the Andrew mentioned by Keivan who basically wanted to acquihire Keivan/AppGet but he lacked the clout…
Comment linking /the-day-appget-died/
on “WinGet is terrible, I want AppGet back”Except why not build on AppGet, or acquire it? I mean they kinda half-tried, it's an interesting read [0]. Microsoft has tonnes of money. They could have probably bought AppGet outright (I assume that since the author shut it down, they weren't too attached and MS could've bought it out), saved a lot of development time/money, had something that worked, and gone from there. There's obviously more to this story, but…
Comment linking /the-day-appget-died/
on “WinGet is terrible, I want AppGet back”Your "Microsoft <3's open source" mentality is also out of date[1][2][3]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28975856 [2] https://keivan.io/the-day-appget-died/ [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28794352
Comment linking /the-day-appget-died/
on “Microsoft YARP”I'm a bit surprised at how many of my friends have jumped ship to Visual Studio Code, including those who are very much for free software. They have always been in the business of embrace, extend, extinguish[0]. People tend to forget how evil M$ used to be because recently they have seemed like a beacon for Open Source, but I think they are just still evil[1]. I think we're still dealing with the same Microsoft that…
Comment linking /the-day-appget-died/
on “VS Code – What's the deal with the telemetry?”I went to read the post about "WinGet" and it was also very nasty. https://keivan.io/the-day-appget-died/
Comment linking /the-day-appget-died/
on “.NET Foundation under fire as resigning board member questions its role”I'm guessing you haven't read his post on this, because he's indeed not upset about the copying, but about the credit: https://keivan.io/the-day-appget-died/
Comment linking /the-day-appget-died/
on “Microsoft copied new Windows Package Manager from rival AppGet, claims developer”It has been admitted. This is what an 'extinguish' looks like after embracing the idea of a Windows package manager by interviewing the creator of AppGet [0][1] and then dumping him to skip the extend part to full on copy it [2] with little to no credit and bundling it in the OS. This is a rare straight extinguish after an embrace, especially in open source. [0] https://keivan.io/the-day-appget-died/ [1] https://app…
Comment linking /the-day-appget-died/
on “Windows Package Manager 1.1”I think people will take issue with this comment due to hating anything that is not open source, but I think that it rings true. > The author wrongfully believes all SSPL licensed code would be “open source” otherwise. This is incorrect. SSPL is good compared to the default, which is closed source. The other alternative would be not really having enough funding to keep developing the software, especially if a larger…
Comment linking /the-day-appget-died/
on “SSPL Is Bad”Probably from his blog post, where he was promised a job, which typically comes with some. https://keivan.io/the-day-appget-died/
Comment linking /the-day-appget-died/
on “Microsoft finally gives AppGet developer the credit he deserves”Let's not forget that Microsoft is still pulling off these kinds of schemes (as of 2020) https://keivan.io/the-day-appget-died/
Comment linking /the-day-appget-died/
on “When Apple Comes Calling, ‘It’s the Kiss of Death’”Debian has by far the most rigorous packaging standards of that list, so subsequent packaging for the other distributions should not be very difficult. Bundling the dependencies into an OCI container or AppImage to run them on non-Debian systems is also trivial once you have a Debian package, but of course that comes with disadvantages. Neither Mac nor Windows have a proper first-party package manager (although wing…
Comment linking /the-day-appget-died/
on “PackagingCon – a conference only for software package management”
