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> In fact, Amazon contributes very little to open source in general, considering how much they take from it I don’t think this is a fact. Amazon seems to contr

> In fact, Amazon contributes very little to open source in general, considering how much they take from it I don’t think this is a fact. Amazon seems to contribute pretty significantly according to the pages [0,1] they put out that describes their contributions. Not to mention their membership in OSS foundations like Linux Foundation. [2] You have the caveat about in relation to benefit they gain, but that’s pretty hard to measure. And I think isn’t really a good measure. I’d like to learn more about why you make such an absolute claim and maybe you have some better measure. I remember back in the 90s when big orgs (Microsoft, IBM) didn’t contribute to open source and can’t even think of any big orgs today that don’t contribute to open source. Even Oracle has big open source projects. [0] https://amzn.github.io/ https://amzn.github.io/ [1] https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/ https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/ [2] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/join/members/ https://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/join/members/

cbushko 6y ago
To me it looks like they mostly contribute to projects that are SDKs to use AWS.
aledalgrande 6y ago
Yeah and also what about projects like Firecracker? https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/ https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/
TechBro8615 6y ago
The absolute claim, aside from being at home in a rant on HN, comes from a cursory glance at https://github.com/amzn https://github.com/amzn, weighted by contributors and popularity, and compared to companies of similar size. Google, Microsoft and Facebook all build and maintain multiple open source projects that are hugely popular with people who use them outside of the company sandboxes. For example, people benefit from React without Facebook gaining much directly. (Facebook! If Facebook has any redeeming qualities, it's their open source contributions to the frontend ecosystem, although I promise you I could ascribe malicious intent to those as well...) Contrast that with Amazon. On their GitHub page, I see a few obscure projects amongst a bulbous array of AWS SDKs. To the sibling comment that asked about Firecracker -- I think Firecracker is awesome, and I did mention that in my original complaint. They even created it themselves! Well, a team of amazing engineers in Romania did. I have no personal insight into the matter, but it seems like they operate relatively independently from the AWS profit machine. Good for them too, it's incredible software. But I'm sure if they were to tell the story of how they got buy-in at Amazon to open source it, the same themes would come up -- how does Amazon benefit from this? In the case of Firecracker, the more people test it / harden it / run Doom on it, the more value Amazon can provide on its serverless platform. So again, unlikely to be purely altruistic intentions... but that's not to say there's anything wrong with that. I just find it all a bit distasteful in aggregate.
- dblock 6y ago
  A better URL to look at is https://github.com/enterprises/amazon https://github.com/enterprises/amazon.
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    That is a 404, so not better.
    - dblock 6y ago
      Possibly my bad, it may require being a member of one of the orgs.
- the_duke 6y ago
  They didn't even create firecracker themselves. It's a fork of Googles crossvm.
- ncann 6y ago
  When I think of Google I think of Go, Angular, protobuf, Bazel, Dart, Flutter, Android, Chromium, Kubernetes, Tensorflow, etc. When I think of MS I think of C#, TypeScript, VSCode, .NET When I think of Facebook I think of React, Flux, Jest, PyTorch, GraphQL, Haxl When I think of Apple I think of Swift, WebKit When I think of Amazon...I can't really think of anything
  - dimitrios1 6y ago
    Facebook: Relay, Cassandra, React Native, RocksDB, Presto, Reason, btrfs, osquery. Apple made significant contributions to LLVM and Clang Hell IBM has more open source contributions (many through the Apache foundation and standards committees) than Amazon, which is saying something.
    - cthalupa 6y ago
      >Cassandra This is an interesting one in the context of this discussion. It likely does not exist as we know it without Amazon's Dynamo paper.
dehrmann 6y ago
I have no idea if Amazon does this or not, but maintaining forks of projects is no fun, so it's in a company's best interest to contribute bug fixes and improvements that aren't part of their secret sauce.

cbushko 6y ago

To me it looks like they mostly contribute to projects that are SDKs to use AWS.

aledalgrande 6y ago

Yeah and also what about projects like Firecracker? https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/ https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/

TechBro8615 6y ago

The absolute claim, aside from being at home in a rant on HN, comes from a cursory glance at https://github.com/amzn https://github.com/amzn, weighted by contributors and popularity, and compared to companies of similar size. Google, Microsoft and Facebook all build and maintain multiple open source projects that are hugely popular with people who use them outside of the company sandboxes. For example, people benefit from React without Facebook gaining much directly. (Facebook! If Facebook has any redeeming qualities, it's their open source contributions to the frontend ecosystem, although I promise you I could ascribe malicious intent to those as well...) Contrast that with Amazon. On their GitHub page, I see a few obscure projects amongst a bulbous array of AWS SDKs. To the sibling comment that asked about Firecracker -- I think Firecracker is awesome, and I did mention that in my original complaint. They even created it themselves! Well, a team of amazing engineers in Romania did. I have no personal insight into the matter, but it seems like they operate relatively independently from the AWS profit machine. Good for them too, it's incredible software. But I'm sure if they were to tell the story of how they got buy-in at Amazon to open source it, the same themes would come up -- how does Amazon benefit from this? In the case of Firecracker, the more people test it / harden it / run Doom on it, the more value Amazon can provide on its serverless platform. So again, unlikely to be purely altruistic intentions... but that's not to say there's anything wrong with that. I just find it all a bit distasteful in aggregate.

dblock 6y ago
A better URL to look at is https://github.com/enterprises/amazon https://github.com/enterprises/amazon.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  That is a 404, so not better.
  - dblock 6y ago
    Possibly my bad, it may require being a member of one of the orgs.
the_duke 6y ago
They didn't even create firecracker themselves. It's a fork of Googles crossvm.
ncann 6y ago
When I think of Google I think of Go, Angular, protobuf, Bazel, Dart, Flutter, Android, Chromium, Kubernetes, Tensorflow, etc. When I think of MS I think of C#, TypeScript, VSCode, .NET When I think of Facebook I think of React, Flux, Jest, PyTorch, GraphQL, Haxl When I think of Apple I think of Swift, WebKit When I think of Amazon...I can't really think of anything
- dimitrios1 6y ago
  Facebook: Relay, Cassandra, React Native, RocksDB, Presto, Reason, btrfs, osquery. Apple made significant contributions to LLVM and Clang Hell IBM has more open source contributions (many through the Apache foundation and standards committees) than Amazon, which is saying something.
  - cthalupa 6y ago
    >Cassandra This is an interesting one in the context of this discussion. It likely does not exist as we know it without Amazon's Dynamo paper.

dehrmann 6y ago

I have no idea if Amazon does this or not, but maintaining forks of projects is no fun, so it's in a company's best interest to contribute bug fixes and improvements that aren't part of their secret sauce.