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> In fact, Amazon contributes very little to open source in general, considering how much they take from it

I don’t think this is a fact. Amazon seems to contribute pretty significantly according to the pages [0,1] they put out that describes their contributions. Not to mention their membership in OSS foundations like Linux Foundation. [2]

You have the caveat about in relation to benefit they gain, but that’s pretty hard to measure. And I think isn’t really a good measure.

I’d like to learn more about why you make such an absolute claim and maybe you have some better measure.

I remember back in the 90s when big orgs (Microsoft, IBM) didn’t contribute to open source and can’t even think of any big orgs today that don’t contribute to open source. Even Oracle has big open source projects.

[0] https://amzn.github.io/ [1] https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/ [2] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/join/members/

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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, 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.

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

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.

>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.

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)

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-in...

No I would not add Kotlin to Google's credit. All the initial work and exponential adoption started with JetBrains. Google only greenlit it as an official Android dev language eventually (barring whatever OSS work they're doing on it only now).

Google is surely pumping lots of money into Kotlin, had it not been for them, and Kotlin would just be yet another runner up in the long list of JVM guest languages.

It is also due to Android Studio performance issues that Kotlin compiler improvements came to be, and also the compiler plugins for stuff like kapt and Jetpack Composer.

Android Java might be stagnant, not kept up to date with standard Java, yet it still rules in Studio tooling performance.

Kotlin was created by the Jetbrains team behind Intellij/Resharper. It's named after a city outside of St. Petersburg, Russia. It has nothing to do with Google...

Kotlin is an island, not a city. City is called Kronshatd.

City is called Kronstadt. Sorry, couldn't resist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kronstadt_rebellion

I really don't understand this argument. Why do you think Facebook and Google have so many open source contributions? Is it really out of the goodness of their hearts? Or is it because that was part of their DELIBERATE STRATEGY to attract talent and use OSS as part of marketing outreach.

Microsoft's core business is developer tooling. In the 90's and early 2000's that could be closed-source and proprietary. By the 2010s it was clear that the only way to operate with the kind of tools they have is to be open source, so they pivoted. But their goal is still business.

Google built Kubernetes as a platform play to compete with AWS and Azure - brilliantly - by feeding engineer fears about "lock-in", giving them a set of tools that they could justify feeling "free", and then when the engineers invariably said "this is too complicated to build, maintain, and operate" they turned around and sold a GCP managed kubernetes solution! After all, who better to operate Kubernetes than the team that built it, amirite?

Android is the same play just competing with closed-source iOS instead of AWS.

Facebook built GraphQL for developers on THEIR Platform.

Apple built Swift for developers on THEIR platform.

Examples like this are just as cynical and capitalistic profit-driven as AWS "open sourcing" an SDK for interacting with AWS.

> 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/#/

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.

They didn't even create firecracker themselves. It's a fork of Googles crossvm.

A better URL to look at is https://github.com/enterprises/amazon.

That is a 404, so not better.

Possibly my bad, it may require being a member of one of the orgs.

https://github.com/aws

https://github.com/awslabs

To me it looks like they mostly contribute to projects that are SDKs to use AWS.

Yeah and also what about projects like Firecracker?

https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/

I have no idea if Amazon does this or not, but maintaining forks of projects is no fun, so it's in a company's best interest to contribute bug fixes and improvements that aren't part of their secret sauce.

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