Hopefully they also weigh in the fact that screwing developers over is terrible publicity. Assume 100k developers see this and are slightly less inclined to trust MS in future, this bad publicity could easily cost them 1mn USD plus. A good will gesture of 100k USD at the start for consulting could have saved everyone a lot of trouble.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23332123 elsewhere in this thread for an example of the consequences.

The cost of GitHub to MS was around 250 usd per user. If 4000 users leave that’s already a million USD.

I worked for a brand & marketing company for 15 years and I observed that most of my clients had pretty short memories when it came to how they felt about me. If the last few milestones were really great they quickly forgot an incident. Obviously, the more impactful an incident, the longer/more positive milestones had to be. An incident too impactful got your fired - but, in general, this was my experience.

Even in their recent history Microsoft has repeated incidents, but also has some very big positive milestones. Also, keeping in mind, some customers will only see the positive milestones.

Very true. People currently love VS Code and it makes their life much easier. I remember for a long time .NET friends of mine would extol Microsoft just cause Visual Studio worked really well with C#. Microsoft could do no wrong as long they could seamlessly work on Windows Apps.

I find MS seems quite immune to terrible publicity in the recent years. "But it's not the same company as before! They are doing open-source now!" yada yada

They are not immune. As someone who has been supportive of Microsoft getting their act together, and who recently spoke at a Microsoft-sponsored conference, this stuff makes me hesitant to give any Microsoft-owned properties money and discourages me from trying new Microsoft products.

There will be newer people after you flocking to the new Microsoft. Given how scummy and bad they have been in the past and how many people have been cheerleading them here, do you really think it works that way?

When people were warning against Microsoft on this forum they were just set aside as cynical, grumpy Unix-beards. If that happens even here, what do you think will happen elsewhere?

I think it's changing. I was one of the young people who did not believe the neckbeards (who are evangelists in their own right) since I wasn't around when the EEE strategy happened. I was happy with Windows because for me it was a better user experience, but today I run Linux and OSX. The world is more connected now than it was. These sentiments can spread faster now.

Giving them constructive criticism and using their open source stuff, but strictly not giving them money might be an acceptable way with dealing them.

For example, I wanted to buy Win10 recently, and also wanted to sign up for Teams. Both experiences were so unimaginably ridiculously terrible, that I ended up cancelling the Teams subscriptions the same day and not buying Win10.

On the other hand .NET (Core), PowerShell, TypeScript and VS Code are all great things.

I mean, isn't that because they haven't been screwing people over (that we know of) recently?

If more stories like this one come out I'm sure the goodwill turns fast.

Well 1mn usd of PR damage is not a big problem when you have 100bn usd plus annual revenue. But for an individual employee it’s a bad reputation hit.

Lots of open source services springing up...that only run on CosmosDB.

I am interested (and kind of depressed) to think - is there actually a legally defensible upper hand that exists here?

If WinGet contains AppGet code and they didn't credit him then yes, absolutely, moral rights in copyright (attribution, right of association, integrity) cannot be transferred during the lifetime of the owner and yes MSFT can be sued for breaching them. It is extremely likely the penalties meted out by a judge wouldn't cover the costs of a lawyer. Not that anything like this would ever see a courtroom, MS will offer a settlement which in this case will be on the magnitude they gave to Mike Rowe for MikeRoweSoft.com (which was an xbox and some travel vouchers and such).

If they stole his unpatented ideas then there's nothing.

In this case the author claims he could have obtained a patent and that code was copied.

Both of these claims are pretty easy to dismiss by simply looking at the respective repositories. They share nothing.

> In this case the author claims he could have obtained a patent and that code was copied.

No. From the source:

> the core mechanics, terminology, the manifest format and structure, even the package repository’s folder structure, are very inspired by AppGet.

In the update it's slightly more vague, but there's no claim of coffee being copied there either:

> 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.

And continues to be more explicit about his complaint:

> What was copied with no credit is the foundation of the project.

Lastly, looking at the repo really doesn't tell you if you could get a patent on it.

In the update and the responses/interviews the author gave he clearly states that Microsoft copied his source, an absurd claim considering both repos are public.

He goes to say that "If I were the patenting type, this would be the thing you would patent. ps. I don't regret not patenting anything."

I mean come on. Every package has a .yaml manifest where there's a download link for every architecture, a hash, a version and an installation recipe. There's nothing to patent here. It would be extremely hard to argue there's no prior art, considering most languages and distributions have been shipping with package managers built just like these for years. Even my text editor has one!

Realistically, the author managed to get a lot of attention for his other startup for almost no cost. By bashing the company that's trendy to bash right now.

This is interesting perspective. Do you think this have the potential to negatively affect responsible parties on MSFT side given the negative PR generated?