The article seems to be focused on Amazon's retail operations, but there may be a stronger case to be made against AWS. While AWS makes it easy to store and pr

The article seems to be focused on Amazon's retail operations, but there may be a stronger case to be made against AWS. While AWS makes it easy to store and process data, it is essentially distributing open-source software. You could argue that AWS is a more successful open-source company than Red Hat, or at least, it is poised to become so. And AWS mostly distributes OSS while others bear the cost of developing it. I've spoken with executives at both Red Hat and Cloudera who say that, while they are experiencing growth on the public cloud, AWS gives very little energy back to open-source. In fact, they say AWS is killing infrastructure software, and it's doing whatever it can to move into apps. That's a much more serious charge than complaining about the societal effects of mom-and-pop shops dying, because in this case, AWS is using a platform they dominate to extend their power into new products and lines of business. Much as Microsoft used Windows to dominate word-processing and other apps, and as Google used search to dominate things like product search. Given that the repercussions of AWS killing innovation in infrastructure software could have a huge effect on the evolution of tech and business in the U.S., I think this is an issue to be taken seriously.