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Comment by rstupek | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious why you'd characterize firecracker as a toy?

It’s (literally) Google’s crosvm with some changes. AWS forked an existing codebase, made some changes that mostly consisted of removing functionality to tailor the VMM for their use case, and then made a big PR push about “open sourcing” Firecracker as though it was a project they built from scratch. The announcement devoted 1 sentence to the fact that it’s a crosvm fork, and that’s not even the only thing covered in that one sentence.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/firecracker-lightweight-vir...

Toy in what sense? It’s the backbone of most serverless offering from AWS.

Toy in the sense that it’s not a significant contribution to the open source community.

Edit: In comparison to the scale of Amazon and the scale of contribution of other similarly-sized tech companies. Firecracker would rank as a more major contribution in my book if it wasn’t a cut-down fork of a pre-existing (and still active!) project.

Define significant? If you're expecting every open source software user to push a million commits before they can be called "contributors" apart from Microsoft/Facebook I dont see any significant contributors.

The context up thread is that Amazon contributes a remarkably small amount to open source compared to the amount of code that Amazon produces and the amount of open source projects that Amazon depends on. Also I find it interesting that you don’t think that Microsoft and Facebook are comparable to Amazon.

After watching a presentation on firecracker from Amazon team it seemed like it is more of a playground for their junior developers than some high profile library. Not trying to be dismissive, just an impression.

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