> This repo contains the full source code of W++ after it reached over 33,000 downloads on the VSCode Marketplace — and was mysteriously flagged and removed.

Any insight into why that is?

Yeah, so here’s the full story: when I first uploaded the W++ VSCode extension to the Marketplace, it took off faster than I expected — over 33,000 downloads in under 2 hours. A few days later, it was suddenly removed.

Only later did I find out it had been labeled as malware by Microsoft — no details, no warning. I emailed their support to clarify what triggered the flag, but I never got a response.

Since then, I’ve made the entire source public here, including the VSCode extension, so folks can inspect and use it freely. If anyone has experience navigating these kinds of takedowns, I’d definitely appreciate insights.

I hope it catches the attention of someone who might be able to find out.

Among other clear differences, it looks like tailscale requires you to sign in with some cloud provider and Malai does not.

I use and like tailscale for similar purposes, but I can see why some people might prefer to skip that aspect, especially.

The hosted part of tailscale is optional. https://headscale.net

"social" in the mid '00s was like that.

That looks really useful.

But, also, wow! Windows-only and AGPLv3 is not a combination I think I've ever seen before.

Who in their right mind would underwrite that? Hallucinations are a necessary part of the process, and there's no way to estimate whether the hallucinations are "accurate enough" or not. It'd be like a reverse lottery ticket for the insurance company.

I'd totally pay to have these (especially a good vanilla Mac OS 8/9 theme) in a usable from on a Linux box today. I liked them then, and I'd still like to have them now. Anyone want to make one that works on Plasma/GTK and take my money?

A guy on reddit was working on one named PrismWM but he went AWOL. There was a mac os 9 lookandfeel in JDK 1.1 that could be updated to a modern version of Java as well.

> One VP argued – pedantically but accurately – that Fred Brooks only said this about projects that are running late; though in my experience, every software project is already late on day one.

One of the kindest things anyone ever did for me as a student (in the 1990s) was introduce me to Fred Brooks after having "encouraged" (maybe a bit coercively) me to read his book. When I had the chance to talk to him for a few seconds, I asked a poorly phrased version of "aren't they all running late?" and got back an amused response that I understood to mean that of course they are.

It seems worth noting that the board you're comparing it to costs <$30 where the dev board you're running on costs $250+.

That said... awesome work! I wish I could get to PyCon this year to see your talk.

Are you planning to post your core so others can replicate your work?

A bit. There are licenses that require people to publish their changes, though, and that is almost certainly what the poster meant.

No there aren't. You can make changes to AGPLv3 software without publishing it anywhere. The only requirement is that you make your changes available in source form to anyone that you distribute changes to, which may be entirely private, or involve no one besides yourself.

The AGPL requires that your publish your source to the people who use your software over the network.

The AGPL requires that you publish a notice that the source is available on demand to the people who use your software over the network. The easiest way to do this is usually to just publish your changes so you can link everyone to it, but that is not a requirement of the license.

You can run derivative AGPLv3 software to service the public without distributing your changes to the source code without violating the license as long as nobody asks for the code.

From the text of the AGPL:

> The GNU Affero General Public License is designed specifically to ensure that, in such cases, the modified source code becomes available to the community. It requires the operator of a network server to provide the source code of the modified version running there to the users of that server. Therefore, public use of a modified version, on a publicly accessible server, gives the public access to the source code of the modified version.

If you're interpreting that as something different than "publish", I think you're splitting hairs.

That's not in the terms of the license, that's in the preamble as a stated goal. Read sections 4-6. They're not that long and don't really have much legalese.

In practice, the goal is met because someone is likely to request the source for AGPL software. Publishing the code is not a requirement of the license though.

Mostly no, but I read the overall piece as a complaint that they got a fork when they were hoping to get a collaborator.

I mean, the title is “Getting Forked by Microsoft,” not “Microsoft Removed My Copyright Notice.” They don’t even outright state that the fork is missing the required attribution, you have to infer it.

Anyways, the real question should be: what is the most productive form for the project/technology? Separate efforts may not the answer, we're looking for.