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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 contr

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.
    - dimitrios1 6y ago
      Yes that's true. Also interesting is, AFAIK, DynamoDB does not follow the Dynamo paper. DynamoDB uses an architecture based on single-leader replication, and the Dynamo paper describes a process where a coordinator node is in charge of replicating to each node. If I am not confused, any node among the top N nodes in the preference list can act as the coordinator. (This information may be slightly out of date at this point)
- galaxyLogic 6y ago
  I would add Kotlin to Google's credit. But I think it's important to note that these companies don't contribute to open source out of any moral obligation, do they? I think they do it to tie more developers and development around their eco-systems and products. Maybe Amazon should get smart and start doing something similar. Or maybe they don't need that. But in any case I don't hold it morally against them that they don't. I think a bigger issue is it seems they pay and have been paying very little or no taxes. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/04/amazon-had-to-pay-federal-income-taxes-for-the-first-time-since-2016.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/04/amazon-had-to-pay-federal-in...
oblio 6y ago
https://github.com/aws https://github.com/aws https://github.com/awslabs https://github.com/awslabs
amzn-throw 6y ago
> 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. Amazon and AWS is a massive multinational corporation with development teams around the world. Including Romania, where we had a dev center for a very long time: http://romania.amazon.com/#/ http://romania.amazon.com/#/ There is no such thing as the AWS profit machine. All dev teams around the world operate with similar levels of autonomy and responsibility. It's just that some of them are working on super internal systems, some on super external, and some open source. Some make a ton of money, and some don't make any, but are beneficial to the overall developer experience/ecosystem, and so make sense.

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.
  - dimitrios1 6y ago
    Yes that's true. Also interesting is, AFAIK, DynamoDB does not follow the Dynamo paper. DynamoDB uses an architecture based on single-leader replication, and the Dynamo paper describes a process where a coordinator node is in charge of replicating to each node. If I am not confused, any node among the top N nodes in the preference list can act as the coordinator. (This information may be slightly out of date at this point)
galaxyLogic 6y ago
I would add Kotlin to Google's credit. But I think it's important to note that these companies don't contribute to open source out of any moral obligation, do they? I think they do it to tie more developers and development around their eco-systems and products. Maybe Amazon should get smart and start doing something similar. Or maybe they don't need that. But in any case I don't hold it morally against them that they don't. I think a bigger issue is it seems they pay and have been paying very little or no taxes. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/04/amazon-had-to-pay-federal-income-taxes-for-the-first-time-since-2016.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/04/amazon-had-to-pay-federal-in...

oblio 6y ago

https://github.com/aws https://github.com/aws https://github.com/awslabs https://github.com/awslabs

amzn-throw 6y ago

> 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. Amazon and AWS is a massive multinational corporation with development teams around the world. Including Romania, where we had a dev center for a very long time: http://romania.amazon.com/#/ http://romania.amazon.com/#/ There is no such thing as the AWS profit machine. All dev teams around the world operate with similar levels of autonomy and responsibility. It's just that some of them are working on super internal systems, some on super external, and some open source. Some make a ton of money, and some don't make any, but are beneficial to the overall developer experience/ecosystem, and so make sense.