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Comment by through-a-weigh | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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)

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?

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)

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