Ask HN: How much does Amazon contribute to the open source community? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How much does Amazon contribute to the open source community?

#31

Post by shasta » Sat, Apr 11, 2015, 3:02 PM UTC

GeneralMayhem wrote: post #25

LamaOfRuin wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this in your contract / some IP agreement you sign? I wonder if they would drop this as fast as they dropped the warehouse employee anti-compete agreement if it was publicized. It would also be interesting to hear from a lawyer with relevant expertise if that is actually enforceable for most employees.

IANAL. It's in pretty much every employment contract in the software industry. Washington has code 49.44.140 which makes such terms unenforceable unless: >(a) the invention relates > (i) directly to the business of the employer, or > (ii) to the employer's actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development, >or (b) the invention results from any work performed by the employee for the employer California has s…

This clause was the sticking point of the last employment contract I signed. I tried to insist that they separate the compensation they were offering me into the portion for my general employment and the portion for these outside ideas so that I could decide which to accept. They never would do that, but I ended up getting a 30% higher offer through this negotiation.

Re: Ask HN: How much does Amazon contribute to the open source community?

#32

Post by simonebrunozzi » Sat, Apr 11, 2015, 3:03 PM UTC

cperciva wrote: post #5

It'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…

Colin, when I was at AWS (6+ years, left in 2014) I was a big supporter of FreeBSD on EC2, and I did my part in convincing people that we should support you - happy to see that you are grateful for that, and thanks again for your support.

Re: Ask HN: How much does Amazon contribute to the open source community?

#33

Post by mixologic » Sat, Apr 11, 2015, 4:25 PM UTC

I know that in an effort to provide SDK's for their services, they have also produced some greate high quality supporting Libraries.

Guzzle, an http library for PHP came out of their PHP SDK: https://github.com/mtdowling is the author, and participates in the php framework interop group on behalf of Guzzle.

Re: Ask HN: How much does Amazon contribute to the open source community?

#34

Post by walshemj » Sat, Apr 11, 2015, 4:27 PM UTC

raverbashing wrote: post #14

lost_my_pwd wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You think that amazons competitors would not use this sort of attack hint the walmarts and supermarkets of this world have along record of being ultra aggressive ask any Farmer about how suppliers are bulled.

Re: Ask HN: How much does Amazon contribute to the open source community?

#35

Post by srean » Sat, Apr 11, 2015, 4:33 PM UTC

I have heard both good and bad things about Flipkart, the obvious Amazon competitor in India, but something that makes them quite attractive to me is their healthy open source portfolio https://github.com/Flipkart From what I have heard from people working at the place is that it isnt any well thought out strategic decision to attract developers, just something that felt right to them because they use quite a bit of open source stuff. If anyone knows more I will be quite interested to learn.

Re: Ask HN: How much does Amazon contribute to the open source community?

#36

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Apr 11, 2015, 4:35 PM UTC

GeneralMayhem wrote: post #25

LamaOfRuin wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this in your contract / some IP agreement you sign? I wonder if they would drop this as fast as they dropped the warehouse employee anti-compete agreement if it was publicized. It would also be interesting to hear from a lawyer with relevant expertise if that is actually enforceable for most employees.

IANAL. It's in pretty much every employment contract in the software industry. Washington has code 49.44.140 which makes such terms unenforceable unless: >(a) the invention relates > (i) directly to the business of the employer, or > (ii) to the employer's actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development, >or (b) the invention results from any work performed by the employee for the employer California has s…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How much does Amazon contribute to the open source community?

#37

Post by azim » Sat, Apr 11, 2015, 4:52 PM UTC

LamaOfRuin wrote: post #23

through-a-weigh wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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)

Re: Ask HN: How much does Amazon contribute to the open source community?

#38

Post by mizzao » Sat, Apr 11, 2015, 5:45 PM UTC

jeorgun wrote: post #12

hackercurious wrote: post #11

Richard 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.

Apple's considerable open source contributions?

Re: Ask HN: How much does Amazon contribute to the open source community?

#39

Post by thebiglebrewski » Sat, Apr 11, 2015, 5:50 PM UTC

When the Echo came out, I created a proxy to add functionality (http://alexaho.me). One of those functionalities was a Hue integration, which Amazon integrated natively this week.

All of my code was open sourced. I never received any credit or compensation from Amazon for my idea or code, if they happened to look at it and frankly, I wouldn't try to fight them. Who would try to fight a company with such a large legal team?

Even a thank you for my idea would've been nice...

Re: Ask HN: How much does Amazon contribute to the open source community?

#40

Post by john82smith » Sat, Apr 11, 2015, 6:15 PM UTC

GeneralMayhem wrote: post #25

LamaOfRuin wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this in your contract / some IP agreement you sign? I wonder if they would drop this as fast as they dropped the warehouse employee anti-compete agreement if it was publicized. It would also be interesting to hear from a lawyer with relevant expertise if that is actually enforceable for most employees.

IANAL. It's in pretty much every employment contract in the software industry. Washington has code 49.44.140 which makes such terms unenforceable unless: >(a) the invention relates > (i) directly to the business of the employer, or > (ii) to the employer's actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development, >or (b) the invention results from any work performed by the employee for the employer California has s…

"The problem is that those terms are vague enough that they can be construed to apply to pretty much any software."

Bingo. Amazon has it's fingers in everything. Games, machine learning, language development, OS development, distributed computing, general algorithm development, video... It's pretty much impossible to find anything that doesn't "compete" with the company.