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Comment by cthalupa | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

It looks like that's missing data - including some very big ones. 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.

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.

This is missing so many repos, from so many companies. What a terrible source.

I don't disagree, but it's the source we have and the author appears open to correction.

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