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It's really hard to guess at Amazon's code contributions; I don't know what weird corporate anti-pattern causes this, but I've received patches from Amazon in e

It's really hard to guess at Amazon's code contributions; I don't know what weird corporate anti-pattern causes this, but I've received patches from Amazon in emails which say "here's a bug fix but don't tell anyone that this came from Amazon", and I know other people who have received similar contributions. In a more financial sense, they have been generous in supporting my work on FreeBSD/EC2 -- not with cash, but lots of free EC2 usage for development and testing.

vertoc 12y ago
Yeah there's a weird internal thing where Amazon employees are not supposed to publicly contribute to open source projects but I don't know the reasoning behind that...
- dudleydoright 12y ago
  Former Amazonian here. When I was employed: To do ANY FOSS work as an individual unrelated to the company (And I mean ANY: private projects that may be on Github, projects with nothing to do with Amazon) required a one-off application for permission. To actually contribute something to some FOSS project that is in use at Amazon (For example, to fix a bug) requires even more special permissions (I think it is once per submission but cannot remember). This is to "protect Amazon IP"; you can imagine why people try and skip the hassle.
  - atopuzov 12y ago
    Same rules apply now.
  - LamaOfRuin 12y ago
    Is this in your contract / some IP agreement you sign? I wonder if they would drop this as fast as they dropped the warehouse employee anti-compete agreement if it was publicized. It would also be interesting to hear from a lawyer with relevant expertise if that is actually enforceable for most employees.
    - GeneralMayhem 12y ago
      IANAL. It's in pretty much every employment contract in the software industry. Washington has code 49.44.140 which makes such terms unenforceable unless: >(a) the invention relates > (i) directly to the business of the employer, or > (ii) to the employer's actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development, >or (b) the invention results from any work performed by the employee for the employer California has section 2870, which is almost identical. The problem is that those terms are vague enough that they can be construed to apply to pretty much any software. The big companies have varied enough business that (a) is hard to get away from, especially if it's Web based and you work for Amazon/Google/Facebook, and software techniques are generalizable that they could probably claim (b) as well. As a result, all of those companies have various internal processes to request that the company either release IP for side projects or allow it to be open sourced with the company as the copyright holder but the employee listed as the author.
      - shasta 12y ago
        This clause was the sticking point of the last employment contract I signed. I tried to insist that they separate the compensation they were offering me into the portion for my general employment and the portion for these outside ideas so that I could decide which to accept. They never would do that, but I ended up getting a 30% higher offer through this negotiation.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
      - john82smith 12y ago
        "The problem is that those terms are vague enough that they can be construed to apply to pretty much any software." Bingo. Amazon has it's fingers in everything. Games, machine learning, language development, OS development, distributed computing, general algorithm development, video... It's pretty much impossible to find anything that doesn't "compete" with the company.
  - oneoffoneoff 12y ago
    I'm a prolific open source contributor, and I found it strange when Amazon tried to recruit me. Let me get this straight: you're scouting me because of all this open source stuff which you will now insist I abandon.
    - Terretta 12y ago
      You don't have to abandon. You just have to check your ego and contribute anonymously, with full corporate backing.
      - ozten 12y ago
        This is bad advice and creates a liability for the project. Many large FOSS projects require you to identify yourself and sign a committer's agreement.
      - oneoffoneoff 12y ago
        I would rather work for a company that appreciates the value of my open source involvement and encourages me to develop it further.
  - john82smith 12y ago
    You forgot to mention the blanket "no game development" policy, which apparently includes activities such as discussing game ideas or giving feedback to friends that are developing their own games. Lately I've been hearing that we (Amazon employees) are required to get approval to take any online courses, such as offerings from Coursera. Something about you may write code that gets shown to someone outside the company blah blah blah. The way things are playing out seems a bit ridiculous. I do wonder some times if Amazon is going to start trying to say that you can't contribute funds to a certain organization because it may "compete with the interests of Amazon."
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - eva1984 12y ago
    As an Amazonian, I was shocked one day by telling my colleagues about some javascript widget I am working on and a plan to open source it, I got warned that pretty much everything that developed on my laptop belongs to the company, thus I need my manager's permission to open source something that is not pretty much not related to anything in do in my fulltime job....
- through-a-weigh 12y ago
  This mostly begins and ends with fear of liability. Amazon has lots of assets, tiny margins, and a lot of deep-pocketed competitors more than happy to fund legal battles by proxy, to say nothing of smaller trolls. (What other company is going head-to-head with Walmart, Microsoft, Google, Bertelsmann, and Apple in different market sectors at the same time?) Restricting "official" contributions is really about limiting the legal attack surface.
  - LamaOfRuin 12y ago
    That seems like a pretty empty justification. - Amazon already has immense attack surface - software is generally distributed without warranty and includes liability disclaimers - They wouldn't even be distributing any of the software. Any lawsuits based on contributions like that should be thrown out at the nuisance level, and they must already have an army or lawyers dealing with those. (I only play a lawyer on the internet)
    - mgkimsal 12y ago
      You put it better than I could. Now, one might argue that many of the other attack surfaces are necessary byproducts of markets they want to operate in, and software development isn't a market they're profiting from, therefore they shouldn't unnecessarily open themselves up to potential litigation. However, given how much so many other large companies already contribute, publicly, sometimes to the very systems Amazon may be using, it does seem a pretty hollow claim. If some of Amazon's system failed because of some patch that Google contributed to project X, would Amazon's first reaction be to sue Google?
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
    - azim 12y ago
      One of the major fears every company faces today is patent trolls. Regardless of whether you are in the right or not, a patent infringement lawsuit will be an immense cost to fight. Opening up internal source code or having public record of which tools/libraries you use by contributing back to them significantly increases the attack surface for patent trolls. Many companies, like Netflix, are willing to take on that risk. Many other companies are not willing to take on that risk. (Also not a lawyer)
- xmcredpol 12y ago
  Another former employee here. When our company was acquired, all of the engineers were given these guidelines immediately (signing/agreeing was a non-negotiable precondition of keeping your job). It was essentially a blanket ban on any programming outside of work. No open source contributions, game development, or work on any software used in current (or future!) Amazon markets. The language was such that even learning (courses, books, writing a single line of test code, etc) was a prohibited. Some of this was surely just liability reduction gone mad, but the totality of it felt like a tool to limit the career options of employees. Some kind of Kafkaesque talent retention strategy.
  - Terretta 12y ago
    No. An analysis of contribution patterns would signal to GCE, Azure, etc., what they're up to, in advance. Not a good strategy.
TallGuyShort 12y ago
Same here. I've seen them contribute to a project I work on but it's rarely with code.
lost_my_pwd 12y ago
At another big online — and offline — book retailer the reason for this type of behavior was because of the legal department and upper management. For legal, there was a huge fear that anything we released or contributed to could open us up to liability; so there was a huge, undefined, process to get anything approved. With upper management, I think the issue was that by releasing something we might be giving away a competitive advantage or insights into our operations — that's the impression I was given but can't say absolutely. It's not a far stretch to imagine similar corporate thinking at Amazon.
- raverbashing 12y ago
  Gotta love "old company" mentality/paranoia But maybe some people contribute indirectly/do it like a personal contribution instead of a "corporate" one?
  - th3iedkid 12y ago
    >>But maybe some people contribute indirectly/do it like a personal contribution instead of a "corporate" one? like in one of those parent comments of this , it seems very unlikely given : >>>>To do ANY FOSS work as an individual unrelated to the company (And I mean ANY: private projects that may be on Github, projects with nothing to do with Amazon) required a one-off application for permission. And a few more regulations on even things such as taking courses!
  - walshemj 12y ago
    You think that amazons competitors would not use this sort of attack hint the walmarts and supermarkets of this world have along record of being ultra aggressive ask any Farmer about how suppliers are bulled.
andrewstuart 12y ago
Generous is easy when it's providing computing resources which effectively costs them nothing. It's disgraceful that Amazon haven't offered you significant financial support. They get the benefit of your hard work and you don't see a cent of the bajillions Amazon is making.
- cperciva 12y ago
  Generous is easy when it's providing computing resources which effectively costs them nothing. Bandwidth and storage and compute time doesn't "effectively cost Amazon nothing". It's disgraceful that Amazon haven't offered you significant financial support. Amazon has tried to hire me, and I'm sure that if I accepted their offers FreeBSD/EC2 is one of the things which I would be working on. But I'm not looking for a job. What I want from Amazon is access to information and to not be spending my own money on this. They get the benefit of your hard work and you don't see a cent of the bajillions Amazon is making. I like to think that FreeBSD users get the benefit of my hard work.
simonebrunozzi 12y ago
Colin, when I was at AWS (6+ years, left in 2014) I was a big supporter of FreeBSD on EC2, and I did my part in convincing people that we should support you - happy to see that you are grateful for that, and thanks again for your support.
- cperciva 12y ago
  Simone, thanks for all your help over the years! I don't think we ever talked directly, but I was certainly aware of and very grateful for your influence.

vertoc 12y ago

Yeah there's a weird internal thing where Amazon employees are not supposed to publicly contribute to open source projects but I don't know the reasoning behind that...

dudleydoright 12y ago
Former Amazonian here. When I was employed: To do ANY FOSS work as an individual unrelated to the company (And I mean ANY: private projects that may be on Github, projects with nothing to do with Amazon) required a one-off application for permission. To actually contribute something to some FOSS project that is in use at Amazon (For example, to fix a bug) requires even more special permissions (I think it is once per submission but cannot remember). This is to "protect Amazon IP"; you can imagine why people try and skip the hassle.
- atopuzov 12y ago
  Same rules apply now.
- LamaOfRuin 12y ago
  Is this in your contract / some IP agreement you sign? I wonder if they would drop this as fast as they dropped the warehouse employee anti-compete agreement if it was publicized. It would also be interesting to hear from a lawyer with relevant expertise if that is actually enforceable for most employees.
  - GeneralMayhem 12y ago
    IANAL. It's in pretty much every employment contract in the software industry. Washington has code 49.44.140 which makes such terms unenforceable unless: >(a) the invention relates > (i) directly to the business of the employer, or > (ii) to the employer's actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development, >or (b) the invention results from any work performed by the employee for the employer California has section 2870, which is almost identical. The problem is that those terms are vague enough that they can be construed to apply to pretty much any software. The big companies have varied enough business that (a) is hard to get away from, especially if it's Web based and you work for Amazon/Google/Facebook, and software techniques are generalizable that they could probably claim (b) as well. As a result, all of those companies have various internal processes to request that the company either release IP for side projects or allow it to be open sourced with the company as the copyright holder but the employee listed as the author.
    - shasta 12y ago
      This clause was the sticking point of the last employment contract I signed. I tried to insist that they separate the compensation they were offering me into the portion for my general employment and the portion for these outside ideas so that I could decide which to accept. They never would do that, but I ended up getting a 30% higher offer through this negotiation.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - john82smith 12y ago
      "The problem is that those terms are vague enough that they can be construed to apply to pretty much any software." Bingo. Amazon has it's fingers in everything. Games, machine learning, language development, OS development, distributed computing, general algorithm development, video... It's pretty much impossible to find anything that doesn't "compete" with the company.
- oneoffoneoff 12y ago
  I'm a prolific open source contributor, and I found it strange when Amazon tried to recruit me. Let me get this straight: you're scouting me because of all this open source stuff which you will now insist I abandon.
  - Terretta 12y ago
    You don't have to abandon. You just have to check your ego and contribute anonymously, with full corporate backing.
    - ozten 12y ago
      This is bad advice and creates a liability for the project. Many large FOSS projects require you to identify yourself and sign a committer's agreement.
    - oneoffoneoff 12y ago
      I would rather work for a company that appreciates the value of my open source involvement and encourages me to develop it further.
- john82smith 12y ago
  You forgot to mention the blanket "no game development" policy, which apparently includes activities such as discussing game ideas or giving feedback to friends that are developing their own games. Lately I've been hearing that we (Amazon employees) are required to get approval to take any online courses, such as offerings from Coursera. Something about you may write code that gets shown to someone outside the company blah blah blah. The way things are playing out seems a bit ridiculous. I do wonder some times if Amazon is going to start trying to say that you can't contribute funds to a certain organization because it may "compete with the interests of Amazon."
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- eva1984 12y ago
  As an Amazonian, I was shocked one day by telling my colleagues about some javascript widget I am working on and a plan to open source it, I got warned that pretty much everything that developed on my laptop belongs to the company, thus I need my manager's permission to open source something that is not pretty much not related to anything in do in my fulltime job....
through-a-weigh 12y ago
This mostly begins and ends with fear of liability. Amazon has lots of assets, tiny margins, and a lot of deep-pocketed competitors more than happy to fund legal battles by proxy, to say nothing of smaller trolls. (What other company is going head-to-head with Walmart, Microsoft, Google, Bertelsmann, and Apple in different market sectors at the same time?) Restricting "official" contributions is really about limiting the legal attack surface.
- LamaOfRuin 12y ago
  That seems like a pretty empty justification. - Amazon already has immense attack surface - software is generally distributed without warranty and includes liability disclaimers - They wouldn't even be distributing any of the software. Any lawsuits based on contributions like that should be thrown out at the nuisance level, and they must already have an army or lawyers dealing with those. (I only play a lawyer on the internet)
  - mgkimsal 12y ago
    You put it better than I could. Now, one might argue that many of the other attack surfaces are necessary byproducts of markets they want to operate in, and software development isn't a market they're profiting from, therefore they shouldn't unnecessarily open themselves up to potential litigation. However, given how much so many other large companies already contribute, publicly, sometimes to the very systems Amazon may be using, it does seem a pretty hollow claim. If some of Amazon's system failed because of some patch that Google contributed to project X, would Amazon's first reaction be to sue Google?
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  - azim 12y ago
    One of the major fears every company faces today is patent trolls. Regardless of whether you are in the right or not, a patent infringement lawsuit will be an immense cost to fight. Opening up internal source code or having public record of which tools/libraries you use by contributing back to them significantly increases the attack surface for patent trolls. Many companies, like Netflix, are willing to take on that risk. Many other companies are not willing to take on that risk. (Also not a lawyer)
xmcredpol 12y ago
Another former employee here. When our company was acquired, all of the engineers were given these guidelines immediately (signing/agreeing was a non-negotiable precondition of keeping your job). It was essentially a blanket ban on any programming outside of work. No open source contributions, game development, or work on any software used in current (or future!) Amazon markets. The language was such that even learning (courses, books, writing a single line of test code, etc) was a prohibited. Some of this was surely just liability reduction gone mad, but the totality of it felt like a tool to limit the career options of employees. Some kind of Kafkaesque talent retention strategy.
- Terretta 12y ago
  No. An analysis of contribution patterns would signal to GCE, Azure, etc., what they're up to, in advance. Not a good strategy.

TallGuyShort 12y ago

Same here. I've seen them contribute to a project I work on but it's rarely with code.

lost_my_pwd 12y ago

At another big online — and offline — book retailer the reason for this type of behavior was because of the legal department and upper management. For legal, there was a huge fear that anything we released or contributed to could open us up to liability; so there was a huge, undefined, process to get anything approved. With upper management, I think the issue was that by releasing something we might be giving away a competitive advantage or insights into our operations — that's the impression I was given but can't say absolutely. It's not a far stretch to imagine similar corporate thinking at Amazon.

raverbashing 12y ago
Gotta love "old company" mentality/paranoia But maybe some people contribute indirectly/do it like a personal contribution instead of a "corporate" one?
- th3iedkid 12y ago
  >>But maybe some people contribute indirectly/do it like a personal contribution instead of a "corporate" one? like in one of those parent comments of this , it seems very unlikely given : >>>>To do ANY FOSS work as an individual unrelated to the company (And I mean ANY: private projects that may be on Github, projects with nothing to do with Amazon) required a one-off application for permission. And a few more regulations on even things such as taking courses!
- walshemj 12y ago
  You think that amazons competitors would not use this sort of attack hint the walmarts and supermarkets of this world have along record of being ultra aggressive ask any Farmer about how suppliers are bulled.

andrewstuart 12y ago

Generous is easy when it's providing computing resources which effectively costs them nothing. It's disgraceful that Amazon haven't offered you significant financial support. They get the benefit of your hard work and you don't see a cent of the bajillions Amazon is making.

cperciva 12y ago
Generous is easy when it's providing computing resources which effectively costs them nothing. Bandwidth and storage and compute time doesn't "effectively cost Amazon nothing". It's disgraceful that Amazon haven't offered you significant financial support. Amazon has tried to hire me, and I'm sure that if I accepted their offers FreeBSD/EC2 is one of the things which I would be working on. But I'm not looking for a job. What I want from Amazon is access to information and to not be spending my own money on this. They get the benefit of your hard work and you don't see a cent of the bajillions Amazon is making. I like to think that FreeBSD users get the benefit of my hard work.

simonebrunozzi 12y ago

Colin, when I was at AWS (6+ years, left in 2014) I was a big supporter of FreeBSD on EC2, and I did my part in convincing people that we should support you - happy to see that you are grateful for that, and thanks again for your support.

cperciva 12y ago
Simone, thanks for all your help over the years! I don't think we ever talked directly, but I was certainly aware of and very grateful for your influence.