Back when you were at Amazon, I was at Red Hat. (disclosure: I am at Amazon now, and have been for a bit over 13 years). From my perspective when I was at Red

Back when you were at Amazon, I was at Red Hat. (disclosure: I am at Amazon now, and have been for a bit over 13 years). From my perspective when I was at Red Hat, Amazon was very much an IT consumer. Amazon was a _hugely_ important customer for Red Hat, even appearing on stage to give their testimony about the benefits [1]. It was a "lighthouse" customer that really opened some doors to selling Enterprise Software. Part of what we sold to Amazon was being their connection "upstream". In 2001 it was quite unusual for an IT shop like Amazon to participate directly upstream. One benefit of being a customer of Red Hat's was: they will fix bugs and work upstream on your behalf. It was a very reasonable approach in those days to use an existing contractual / support relationship with a vendor like Red Hat to deal with all of those details and complexities, which often required strong social connections among open source developers and maintainers working together upstream. I think that over time as large companies shift to consume open source software directly from upstream, they have to build the capabilities and connections to participate directly rather than going through an intermediary like Red Hat. It can take a fairly long time to do that. [1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2577912/linuxworld--amazon-com-clicks-with-linux.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2577912/linuxworld--am...