Richard Stallman's personal site has lots of information about Amazon.
Ask HN: How much does Amazon contribute to the open source community?
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Re: Ask HN: How much does Amazon contribute to the open source community?
#12Richard Stallman's personal site has lots of information about Amazon. https://stallman.org/amazon.html
Yes, but that doesn't really answer the question. His site also has a lot of information on Apple, Google, and Microsoft, but none of it is about their considerable open source contributions.
Re: Ask HN: How much does Amazon contribute to the open source community?
#13Richard Stallman's personal site has lots of information about Amazon. https://stallman.org/amazon.html
Richard Stallman's website (which is ironic, because he doesn't use a web browser) is full of extremist opinion about lots of things, most of which are irrelevant to this discussion
Re: Ask HN: How much does Amazon contribute to the open source community?
#14It'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…
Gotta love "old company" mentality/paranoia
But maybe some people contribute indirectly/do it like a personal contribution instead of a "corporate" one?
Re: Ask HN: How much does Amazon contribute to the open source community?
#15It'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...
Former Amazonian here.
When I was employed:
To do ANY FOSS work as an individual unrelated to the company (And I mean ANY: private projects that may be on Github, projects with nothing to do with Amazon) required a one-off application for permission.
To actually contribute something to some FOSS project that is in use at Amazon (For example, to fix a bug) requires even more special permissions (I think it is once per submission but cannot remember).
This is to "protect Amazon IP"; you can imagine why people try and skip the hassle.
Re: Ask HN: How much does Amazon contribute to the open source community?
#16It'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...
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.
Re: Ask HN: How much does Amazon contribute to the open source community?
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Former Amazonian here. When I was employed: To do ANY FOSS work as an individual unrelated to the company (And I mean ANY: private projects that may be on Github, projects with nothing to do with Amazon) required a one-off application for permission. To actually contribute something to some FOSS project that is in use at Amazon (For example, to fix a bug) requires even more special permissions (I think it is once per…
Same rules apply now.
Re: Ask HN: How much does Amazon contribute to the open source community?
#18On the 'liability' angle...
Was the legal team really ready to bring lawsuits against any other open source project that was used internally that may have broken or caused a problem (like anything from Apache, for example)?
If not, why would they think they'd be sued as well?
Re: Ask HN: How much does Amazon contribute to the open source community?
#19Amazon doesn't contribute much to the open source community. Most of their contributions happened around the XEN project which they use to power EC2.
Even there though, isn't it mostly bug fixes? Has Amazon contributed any major functionality back? They do a ton of custom stuff and I don't really see any of that showing up like you do with say, Google and cgroups.
Re: Ask HN: How much does Amazon contribute to the open source community?
#20One of the things that I am aware of them Open Sourcing are their chef cookbooks used for opsworks(https://github.com/aws/opsworks-cookbooks). Unfortunately the activity on the repository is a sad read. A lot of issues and PRs created that solve real problems for users of opsworks and in some cases fixes security issues. Most of these sits ignored and unmerged and some, such as one of mine(https://github.com/aws/opsworks-cookbooks/pull/231), have been rejected elsewhere(on Twitter in this case). There are in fact many PRs dealing with SSLv3 and POODLE besides mine for example https://github.com/aws/opsworks-cookbooks/pull/291 and https://github.com/aws/opsworks-cookbooks/pull/281. So while these cookbooks might be open source they are nothing but a read only representation as PRs are very rarely accepted.