Recognition - yes, but money - why? It was open source.
This meeting does not sound at all awkward to me if I was the sales person. To me this sounds like how lots of companies work with open source to make a business.
They take some open source tools (maybe they built it themselves, maybe not), package then and maybe sell some cloud service around it or simply just support.
If I was the sales person I would be delighted to meet the person who wrote a part of the package.
The only reason to be embarrassed is if it did not contain the correct attribution and recognition.
Edit: the fact that it happened 2000 could have made it embarrassing though. Many things have changed since then...
Yes the tools were all open source. This was in 2004 and I just zipped up a compiled exe, the src directory and a license.txt (GPL2) and put it on my website. Similar to Nirsoft which is what inspired me.
The reason behind it being awkward was for half an hour the sales guy had talked up how they were the only company developing tools like this, etc, etc. How the 'big players like VMware don't care about these pain points admins have to deal with' or words to that effect (which was true and why I made the tools in the first place).
Then the moment he finished the sales pitch and I see these 'one of a kind tools' they have been developing I respond with "That's my tool, see..."
I believe the sales guy, at least, believed all the tools he was talking about were made in house. Open source wasn't a widely understood thing back then with Microsoft talking about Linux and open source being a "cancer" and such. Really knocked him off course as I guess he had never been in that situation before (I doubt many have?).
As for following up with the company. I did nothing. I was young and while I knew what they did was wrong (they literally removed my name, link to my website, etc. and put their company name but changed no functionality of the tools as far as I could see and certainly no source code was available!) I didn't have the confidence (or desire tbh) to chase up on some little tools I made to learn and make my life a little easier at work. The company disappeared (I don't know why) sometime around 2010 iirc.
Honestly, it sounds like they might have been willing to purchase a license from you to redistribute the code. Had you reached out, you may have received a few bucks and proper attribution for your work (and your work would have reached a broader audience).
Possibly. Of course they could have contacted me first rather than modifying my program to pass it off as theirs.
I mean it was GPL2 so they could have just used it as is.
Of course this was the early 2000s where many people saw "open source" and felt like it meant they could just do whatever they want. I bet they never entertained the idea I would ever find out let alone be sitting in a sales pitch :)
