Amazon seems a big consumer of open source technology.
Does it give much cash in support to open source projects?
Does it contribute much in other ways?
Ask HN: How much does Amazon contribute to the open source community?
1–10 of 60 posts
Re: Ask HN: How much does Amazon contribute to the open source community?
#2Re: Ask HN: How much does Amazon contribute to the open source community?
#3http://www.quora.com/Did-Amazon-ever-open-source-any-of-its-...
Re: Ask HN: How much does Amazon contribute to the open source community?
#4Amazon doesn't contribute much to the open source community. Most of their contributions happened around the XEN project which they use to power EC2.
Re: Ask HN: How much does Amazon contribute to the open source community?
#5It's really hard to guess at Amazon's code contributions; I don't know what weird corporate anti-pattern causes this, but I've received patches from Amazon in emails which say "here's a bug fix but don't tell anyone that this came from Amazon", and I know other people who have received similar contributions.
In a more financial sense, they have been generous in supporting my work on FreeBSD/EC2 -- not with cash, but lots of free EC2 usage for development and testing.
Re: Ask HN: How much does Amazon contribute to the open source community?
#6It's really hard to guess at Amazon's code contributions; I don't know what weird corporate anti-pattern causes this, but I've received patches from Amazon in emails which say "here's a bug fix but don't tell anyone that this came from Amazon", and I know other people who have received similar contributions. In a more financial sense, they have been generous in supporting my work on FreeBSD/EC2 -- not with cash, but…
Yeah there's a weird internal thing where Amazon employees are not supposed to publicly contribute to open source projects but I don't know the reasoning behind that...
Re: Ask HN: How much does Amazon contribute to the open source community?
#7[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: How much does Amazon contribute to the open source community?
#8Amazon has assume the Linux Kernel developers (~20) from AMD in Dresden/Germany a few Yeats ago and is still hiring Kernel Developers in Germany.
Re: Ask HN: How much does Amazon contribute to the open source community?
#9It's really hard to guess at Amazon's code contributions; I don't know what weird corporate anti-pattern causes this, but I've received patches from Amazon in emails which say "here's a bug fix but don't tell anyone that this came from Amazon", and I know other people who have received similar contributions. In a more financial sense, they have been generous in supporting my work on FreeBSD/EC2 -- not with cash, but…
Same here. I've seen them contribute to a project I work on but it's rarely with code.
Re: Ask HN: How much does Amazon contribute to the open source community?
#10It's really hard to guess at Amazon's code contributions; I don't know what weird corporate anti-pattern causes this, but I've received patches from Amazon in emails which say "here's a bug fix but don't tell anyone that this came from Amazon", and I know other people who have received similar contributions. In a more financial sense, they have been generous in supporting my work on FreeBSD/EC2 -- not with cash, but…
At another big online — and offline — book retailer the reason for this type of behavior was because of the legal department and upper management. For legal, there was a huge fear that anything we released or contributed to could open us up to liability; so there was a huge, undefined, process to get anything approved. With upper management, I think the issue was that by releasing something we might be giving away a competitive advantage or insights into our operations — that's the impression I was given but can't say absolutely.
It's not a far stretch to imagine similar corporate thinking at Amazon.