I've been learning a little bit about "the new Microsoft" and its new relationship with open source, and I think I get it now.
MSFT is treating open source communities and free F/OSS code contributions the way they might have treated blogging and IT forums in a prior era.
It's "developer community" and "power user" engagement. It's a hybrid product management and marketing function.
In this particular scenario, the winget product manager views the appget author as a "Windows enthusiast" of sorts, not a competitor, a peer, or a colleague. Just a "power user persona" of the Microsoft userbase.
So, when you understand this, reading the PM's email to him ahead of winget's launch makes more sense.
> We give appget a call out in our blog post too since we believe there will be space for different package managers on windows. You will see our package manager is based on GitHub too but obviously with our own implementation etc. our package manager will be open source too so obviously we would welcome any contribution from you.
Specifically: it's like getting called out explicitly by a forum mod, or being a frequent blog commenter who is mentioned by name in a blogger's main post.
It's "an honor" to have appget explicitly mentioned in an "official" Microsoft announcement. And to have your community work "inspire" so much of winget's design! So when the PM wrote the email, he probably wasn't even thinking it would feel like trolling. He was probably thinking, "isn't it cool we are doing this 'F/OSS collaboration thing' together? How 'New Microsoft' of us!"
And I can't say I blame him. Microsoft is just less smooth about their appropriation of F/OSS for marketing purposes. Other companies manage to do it without the developers noticing.
If you want to see what Microsoft thinks of open source and contributors, then all you have to do is read the license they want you to agree to before doing so:
MSFT is treating open source communities and free F/OSS code contributions the way they might have treated blogging and IT forums in a prior era.
It's "developer community" and "power user" engagement. It's a hybrid product management and marketing function.
In this particular scenario, the winget product manager views the appget author as a "Windows enthusiast" of sorts, not a competitor, a peer, or a colleague. Just a "power user persona" of the Microsoft userbase.
So, when you understand this, reading the PM's email to him ahead of winget's launch makes more sense.
> We give appget a call out in our blog post too since we believe there will be space for different package managers on windows. You will see our package manager is based on GitHub too but obviously with our own implementation etc. our package manager will be open source too so obviously we would welcome any contribution from you.
Specifically: it's like getting called out explicitly by a forum mod, or being a frequent blog commenter who is mentioned by name in a blogger's main post.
It's "an honor" to have appget explicitly mentioned in an "official" Microsoft announcement. And to have your community work "inspire" so much of winget's design! So when the PM wrote the email, he probably wasn't even thinking it would feel like trolling. He was probably thinking, "isn't it cool we are doing this 'F/OSS collaboration thing' together? How 'New Microsoft' of us!"
And I can't say I blame him. Microsoft is just less smooth about their appropriation of F/OSS for marketing purposes. Other companies manage to do it without the developers noticing.