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Comment by jimmy2020 | Hacker News Reader

jimmy2020

Is there any good that done by Amazon to support OSS? Like ever. They started with cloning MongoDB and now Elastic with actually zero contribution to the community regardless of their insane profits. This is a clear single. Amazon can always clone and redistribute any open source software then lock it in for AWS. If we've started to witness declining in OSS, well at least we know now who started the wave.

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Do people assume that a company as large as AWS would automatically have a lot to contribute to the OSS? Maybe most of Amazon teams have not much to open source yet. Contributing to OSS is a bottom-up effort. An engineer needs to be motivated to generalize her project, to peel the code from Amazon's vast internal infrastructure, and to go through an approval process to open source her project. Given that many teams have razor-sharp focus on delivering features, for good or for bad, I was wondering how many engineers are really motivated enough to open source something internal.

I don't think it's a bottom up process. I feel often it's a top down process. Most companies with lots open source activity normally have management that have decided that is something they want to encourage and then it comes down to people making their code open sourcable.

It is both a top down process and the culture of the company itself. In the real world, we know how big tech open-sourced some of the most efficient technologies that empowered hundreds, if not millions, of startups.

I wish this long process that's exhausting in Amazon applies when it comes to cloning open source projects to get more profits.

You don't need to assume. Amazon's Open Source team regularly talks about how much they do for open source in my companies Slack. It's their own words.

https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/

Yes exactly, you have actually to google it maybe you'll be able to find a useful link that makes Amazon looks good.

Why is this comment downvoted?

I'm not sure what you mean.

Amazon will of course have a PR statement about how it cares about open source. It's not like Apple is known for it's commitment to open source but it has a similar page: https://developer.apple.com/opensource/

IMO Apple's been a much more active and helpful contributor in the OSS arena than AWS. Though that's not saying much.

Firstly, Apple is a hardware company, AWS is a services company, these two things are quite different. I'm not sure why you think mentioning them in this discussion brings anything helpful to the conversation. Secondly, Webkit is hugely influential as an Opensource project.

Well, Apple actually makes quite a lot of software, doesn't it? Such as its own series of operating systems and applications to run on their hardware? I'm not really sure how you think they aren't relevant to a conversation about OSS.

Maybe a dual-company like Mozilla would at least make it more clear that the big guy that are just taking advantage of the free lunch is doing more harm than good?

Elastic should have a for-profit and a non-profit company taking donations that would actually control the open source code and hiring the core part of team working on it.

I mean, we know how badly Amazon is behaving here, but at least they should have a option where they could realistically invest.

Asking for a company to invest in a competitor that can grow and eat their lunch with the money being invested by them is not realistic. Even because the company investing the money would want to know if that money is actually being invested back in the open source software and not used by a competing company.

If, giving this choice, they didn't invest back in the foundation, it would be much more clear that they are doing it in bad faith.

I like to think, or at least I hope, that OSS isn't going to decline, it's just going to evolve. The existing OSI licenses weren't meant for a world of clouds and SAAS. I believe we'll have to find the next-generation of licenses that can succeed where AGPL tried and failed.

You're asserting that they have forked OSS and then not provided back the source code for their own improvements.

I guess we can check their github repos to see if that's the case.

As far as I know DocumentDB is closed source. Btw: I can name zero OSS projects from Amazon and this is not the same for Microsoft (VScode, TS) and FB (React, Jest).

Firecracker is a famous one that I can think of.

Fork of Google crosvm

there's always a fork.

Firecracker, s2n, chalice, jsii.

On top of that AWS has done a lot of contributions upstream, particularly around the linux kernel, https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin..., (particularly the virtualisation stacks involved), some around OpenJDK at what looks like an increasing pace, and the like.

To be clear: not an AWS employee.

I know several employees contributing to the Linux kernel, and I know they're hiring more Rust contributors. You're right though, I think Amazon lags compared to MSFT, FB, and G. Even Netflix or IBM/RedHat, for that matter.

lots of links: https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/

For some companies there are some (very partial) statistics, for instance: https://www.openhub.net/orgs/Google

This seems like a much more positive response than the one they took with MongoDB. I agree, Amazon hasn't done much, but maybe this could be a start?

The start maybe done by open source some technology they use that can profit and help other startups. Maybe open source their own version of "React". That will be a good start.

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