I definitely agree he should have been credited more, and the communications strategy was cruel.
But he released his work, AppGet, under an Apache 2.0 license. Microsoft was free to copy it as long as they followed the terms of the license. That's one of the points of open source.
Microsoft also released their copy of it under the very open MIT license.
The article treats it like a crime, but this is essentially how it should work, right? One open-source project greatly advances the art, and another takes what was created and released freely, and runs with it.
If they literally copied code from AppGet, they may have an issue given that they didn't follow the Apache license terms precisely (at least, it doesn't look like it from a very brief glance at the WinGet repository -- Beigi's name doesn't appear to be in the Apache license notices). But that seems easily fixable.
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/
I actually had read his post. He's very justifiably upset about the lack of credit for AppGet and also the terrible communication, which I mentioned. I thought it was a well-written post.
But the linked Verge article frames it in terms of the copying being the problem, rather than the credit, even calling it Sherlocking. It's not.
I don't think it does? They mention "credit" at least 4 times in the article ("copy" comes up 3 times) and they're very clear that the issue is credit ("The announcement was especially bad given how little credit was given", "Beigi is mostly unhappy with how Microsoft didn’t credit him for his work", etc.). I'm not sure how you read it to imply the crime is in the copying?
Credit for what? They didn't copy his code - they used the same very unoriginal ideas that AppGet used.
It looks like MS doesn't copy the source code but they uses a bit similar yaml format.
I also agree he should credited more.
https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli https://github.com/appget/appget
https://github.com/microsoft/winget-pkgs/blob/master/manifes... https://github.com/appget/appget.packages/blob/master/manife...
Microsoft didn’t copy app get and that’s part of the problem. Had they made a fork then credit would be clear.
He wrote many things, but in the end it's unclear what he didn't like.