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> App Mesh uses the open source Envoy proxy, making it compatible with a wide range of AWS partner and open source tools. Yet another Amazon product based on o

by rocgf 8y ago

> App Mesh uses the open source Envoy proxy, making it compatible with a wide range of AWS partner and open source tools. Yet another Amazon product based on open source software, while still contributing almost nothing to this space.

lawnchair 8y ago
https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/blob/master/LICENSE https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/blob/master/LICENSE Permissions: Commercial use, Modification, Distribution, Patent use, Private use
- rocgf 8y ago
  Apologies, I'm not sure if you are disagreeing with me in any way or not. :) Envoy is indeed open source and freely-available for corporations to use. That is not what I was implying. Amazon, out of all the big companies (Google, Netflix, Microsoft etc.), is the one with the least contribution to the open source world, despite using many of open source tools to build their AWS products.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    If you make something open source and free for anyone to use, don’t complain when anyone uses it. That’s kind of the point.
    - IshKebab 8y ago
      No it isn't. Just because users aren't legally required to contribute doesn't mean that they don't have a moral duty to support the project, if they can. Given Amazon's vast resources I think it is reasonable to feel that they should help out a bit.
  - cthalupa 8y ago
    Is this really true, though? Looks like Amazon has multiple github accounts with lots of projects, including some high profile ones like Firecracker, etc. This has become a bit of an interesting topic to me because it keeps being brought up by people who sort of just state it as fact without providing any real argument. How much is enough? One full time developer? Ten? What if the project doesn't want to merge their contributions? Amazon just got killed on HN for open sourcing all of their ElasticSearch work in a separate repository. I feel like they can't win on open source with some of you guys.
    - jacques_chester 8y ago
      https://medium.freecodecamp.org/the-top-contributors-to-github-2017-be98ab854e87 https://medium.freecodecamp.org/the-top-contributors-to-gith... On these figures, Amazon is behind other giants and has fewer contributions that a number of midsize tech companies like Red Hat or Pivotal (my employer).
      - cthalupa 8y ago
        It looks like that's missing data - including some very big ones. https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker has quite a few stars and came out in 2018 - no mention. All three of them have contributed to the Linux kernel in significant fashions, and it's not listed for any of them, despite the 72k stars. And are github repos and stars the only way to measure open source contribution? The Xen project only has 162 stars, yet I don't think anyone would say it isn't an important project, and it's one Amazon has contributed to - if you're using a PV guest on Xen that's protected against Meltdown, chances are high you're using the Vixen mitigation that Amazon released. Could Amazon do more? Probably. I'm not trying to say they're perfect. But this idea that they don't contribute back to open source seems pretty flawed, even by the data in your link, which seems incomplete.
        jacques_chester 8y ago
        A lot of folks have complained about this data set, but the author has updated based on feedback. So it'll improve. But unless Amazon are hiding several hundred contributors and thousands of commits in a repo that's been magically overlooked for years, the figures tend to make them look bad.
      - googlemike 8y ago
        This is missing so many repos, from so many companies. What a terrible source.
        jacques_chester 8y ago
  - pytyper2 8y ago
    Amazon using it is a big endorsement, I would also imagine that they contribute bug reports.
  - throw882510 8y ago
    It’s tricky to collect Amazon data on this. Amazon contributes back to projects under individual employee developers accounts quite a bit. For some reason Amazon just doesn’t want to show they had any involvement with that commit and doesn’t care about how it’s seen. From the times I’ve seen it, seems like this might by by design
sbr464 8y ago
For core services like a proxy, http server etc, I’m kind of glad when larger companies adopt/support a solid service. I think it validates that choice for other companies, and brings attention/bug fixes etc among other things.
- kjeetgill 8y ago
  While I generally agree I've found Amazon to be particularly bad at supporting their "hosted open source" products vs what they've built. Dynamo and S3 are much more solid than anything they're just wrapping. I think that's part of why it feels like a cheap money grab.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    What is a "cheap" money grab? What else should a business do? Is solving problems for their customers not acceptable?
  - sbr464 8y ago
    While I understand where you are coming from, have you used envoy or Ambassador (based on envoy)? They are extremely well designed, especially to address the service routing issues of multi-cloud, Kubernetes, micro services etc. I was extremely happy to see AWS backing envoy. It somewhat confirmed a lot of the research we did in the space.
mcqueenjordan 8y ago
Please open your eyes before opening your mouth. https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/ https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/
manigandham 8y ago
They don't have to. They're busy serving customers who pay lots of money to have their problems solved, not to pontificate about the morality of building with open-source software. You're free to set your project's license to whatever you want but why complain when it's used the way you said it can be?
- michael_storm 8y ago
  I expect more of companies and people than their minimum legal obligations.
  - plants 8y ago
    It's reasonable to expect that of people, but why of companies? Isn't a company like Amazon's moral compass guided solely by legal obligations?
    - eropple 8y ago
      You are probably right in the sense of what-is, that Amazon's moral compass is guided only by legal obligations. That does not make it what-should-be. Companies are groups of people. Decency is not erased when a corporation enters the picture. Corporations exist for the benefit of the society that grants them their charter and that charter can--and should--be revoked when the corporation acts against the best interests of that society. We do have that power, but we've forgotten about it.
    - chillfox 8y ago
      Companies are just a group of people. Companies don't do anything, people do and then use companies to try and shield themselves from blame.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    That's great but others don't. That's why we have legal definitions, so that we can define clear and objective requirements.
  - 8y ago
Aeolun 8y ago
But we’re not paying them for the product. We’re paying them for the infrastructure. I don’t see why it is different from asking a small one-man shop to take care of my infrastructure for me?
greyskull 8y ago
https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/pull/5580 https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/pull/5580 and https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/pull/5887 https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/pull/5887 It's a start. Looking forward to more contributions from the team.
- sergiotapia 8y ago
  Amazon should be pumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into all these open-source projects they're leveraging.
  - sa46 8y ago
    So 1 full time software engineer on open source projects? Looks like they vastly exceed that already https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/ https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/
  - SheinhardtWigCo 8y ago
    Not according to the licenses of those projects. They’re not a charity.

by rocgf 8y ago

lawnchair 8y ago

https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/blob/master/LICENSE https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/blob/master/LICENSE Permissions: Commercial use, Modification, Distribution, Patent use, Private use

rocgf 8y ago
Apologies, I'm not sure if you are disagreeing with me in any way or not. :) Envoy is indeed open source and freely-available for corporations to use. That is not what I was implying. Amazon, out of all the big companies (Google, Netflix, Microsoft etc.), is the one with the least contribution to the open source world, despite using many of open source tools to build their AWS products.
- scarface74 8y ago
  If you make something open source and free for anyone to use, don’t complain when anyone uses it. That’s kind of the point.
  - IshKebab 8y ago
    No it isn't. Just because users aren't legally required to contribute doesn't mean that they don't have a moral duty to support the project, if they can. Given Amazon's vast resources I think it is reasonable to feel that they should help out a bit.
- cthalupa 8y ago
  Is this really true, though? Looks like Amazon has multiple github accounts with lots of projects, including some high profile ones like Firecracker, etc. This has become a bit of an interesting topic to me because it keeps being brought up by people who sort of just state it as fact without providing any real argument. How much is enough? One full time developer? Ten? What if the project doesn't want to merge their contributions? Amazon just got killed on HN for open sourcing all of their ElasticSearch work in a separate repository. I feel like they can't win on open source with some of you guys.
  - jacques_chester 8y ago
    https://medium.freecodecamp.org/the-top-contributors-to-github-2017-be98ab854e87 https://medium.freecodecamp.org/the-top-contributors-to-gith... On these figures, Amazon is behind other giants and has fewer contributions that a number of midsize tech companies like Red Hat or Pivotal (my employer).
    - cthalupa 8y ago
      It looks like that's missing data - including some very big ones. https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker has quite a few stars and came out in 2018 - no mention. All three of them have contributed to the Linux kernel in significant fashions, and it's not listed for any of them, despite the 72k stars. And are github repos and stars the only way to measure open source contribution? The Xen project only has 162 stars, yet I don't think anyone would say it isn't an important project, and it's one Amazon has contributed to - if you're using a PV guest on Xen that's protected against Meltdown, chances are high you're using the Vixen mitigation that Amazon released. Could Amazon do more? Probably. I'm not trying to say they're perfect. But this idea that they don't contribute back to open source seems pretty flawed, even by the data in your link, which seems incomplete.
      - jacques_chester 8y ago
        A lot of folks have complained about this data set, but the author has updated based on feedback. So it'll improve. But unless Amazon are hiding several hundred contributors and thousands of commits in a repo that's been magically overlooked for years, the figures tend to make them look bad.
    - googlemike 8y ago
      This is missing so many repos, from so many companies. What a terrible source.
      - jacques_chester 8y ago
- pytyper2 8y ago
  Amazon using it is a big endorsement, I would also imagine that they contribute bug reports.
- throw882510 8y ago
  It’s tricky to collect Amazon data on this. Amazon contributes back to projects under individual employee developers accounts quite a bit. For some reason Amazon just doesn’t want to show they had any involvement with that commit and doesn’t care about how it’s seen. From the times I’ve seen it, seems like this might by by design

sbr464 8y ago

For core services like a proxy, http server etc, I’m kind of glad when larger companies adopt/support a solid service. I think it validates that choice for other companies, and brings attention/bug fixes etc among other things.

kjeetgill 8y ago
While I generally agree I've found Amazon to be particularly bad at supporting their "hosted open source" products vs what they've built. Dynamo and S3 are much more solid than anything they're just wrapping. I think that's part of why it feels like a cheap money grab.
- manigandham 8y ago
  What is a "cheap" money grab? What else should a business do? Is solving problems for their customers not acceptable?
- sbr464 8y ago
  While I understand where you are coming from, have you used envoy or Ambassador (based on envoy)? They are extremely well designed, especially to address the service routing issues of multi-cloud, Kubernetes, micro services etc. I was extremely happy to see AWS backing envoy. It somewhat confirmed a lot of the research we did in the space.

mcqueenjordan 8y ago

Please open your eyes before opening your mouth. https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/ https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/

manigandham 8y ago

They don't have to. They're busy serving customers who pay lots of money to have their problems solved, not to pontificate about the morality of building with open-source software. You're free to set your project's license to whatever you want but why complain when it's used the way you said it can be?

michael_storm 8y ago
I expect more of companies and people than their minimum legal obligations.
- plants 8y ago
  It's reasonable to expect that of people, but why of companies? Isn't a company like Amazon's moral compass guided solely by legal obligations?
  - eropple 8y ago
    You are probably right in the sense of what-is, that Amazon's moral compass is guided only by legal obligations. That does not make it what-should-be. Companies are groups of people. Decency is not erased when a corporation enters the picture. Corporations exist for the benefit of the society that grants them their charter and that charter can--and should--be revoked when the corporation acts against the best interests of that society. We do have that power, but we've forgotten about it.
  - chillfox 8y ago
    Companies are just a group of people. Companies don't do anything, people do and then use companies to try and shield themselves from blame.
- manigandham 8y ago
  That's great but others don't. That's why we have legal definitions, so that we can define clear and objective requirements.
- 8y ago

Aeolun 8y ago

But we’re not paying them for the product. We’re paying them for the infrastructure. I don’t see why it is different from asking a small one-man shop to take care of my infrastructure for me?

greyskull 8y ago

https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/pull/5580 https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/pull/5580 and https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/pull/5887 https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/pull/5887 It's a start. Looking forward to more contributions from the team.

sergiotapia 8y ago
Amazon should be pumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into all these open-source projects they're leveraging.
- sa46 8y ago
  So 1 full time software engineer on open source projects? Looks like they vastly exceed that already https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/ https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/
- SheinhardtWigCo 8y ago
  Not according to the licenses of those projects. They’re not a charity.