41–50 of 60 posts
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 leg…
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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
Stallman does use a web browser, just locally. His workflow is that he works offline, but when he runs across mentions of webpages that he might find useful, he queues them up to be wgetted via a proxy, then later points his browser at them. So it doesn't seem too ironic to me that he might put up web pages that others can retrieve (and indeed he's been doing so since the early days of the web). If he had some kind o…
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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…
Lately I've been hearing that we (Amazon employees) are required to get approval to take any online courses, such as offerings from Coursera. Something about you may write code that gets shown to someone outside the company blah blah blah.
The way things are playing out seems a bit ridiculous. I do wonder some times if Amazon is going to start trying to say that you can't contribute funds to a certain organization because it may "compete with the interests of Amazon."
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Stallman does use a web browser, just locally. His workflow is that he works offline, but when he runs across mentions of webpages that he might find useful, he queues them up to be wgetted via a proxy, then later points his browser at them. So it doesn't seem too ironic to me that he might put up web pages that others can retrieve (and indeed he's been doing so since the early days of the web). If he had some kind o…
I never knew he did this, I sometimes do the same with websites I enjoy so I can have archived backups.
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.
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…
Generous is easy when it's providing computing resources which effectively costs them nothing. It's disgraceful that Amazon haven't offered you significant financial support. They get the benefit of your hard work and you don't see a cent of the bajillions Amazon is making.
Bandwidth and storage and compute time doesn't "effectively cost Amazon nothing".
It's disgraceful that Amazon haven't offered you significant financial support.
Amazon has tried to hire me, and I'm sure that if I accepted their offers FreeBSD/EC2 is one of the things which I would be working on. But I'm not looking for a job. What I want from Amazon is access to information and to not be spending my own money on this.
They get the benefit of your hard work and you don't see a cent of the bajillions Amazon is making.
I like to think that FreeBSD users get the benefit of my hard work.
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 leg…
They integrated your code or the idea?
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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?
like in one of those parent comments of this , it seems very unlikely given :
>>>>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.
And a few more regulations on even things such as taking courses!
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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…
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…
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…
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...
When our company was acquired, all of the engineers were given these guidelines immediately (signing/agreeing was a non-negotiable precondition of keeping your job).
It was essentially a blanket ban on any programming outside of work. No open source contributions, game development, or work on any software used in current (or future!) Amazon markets. The language was such that even learning (courses, books, writing a single line of test code, etc) was a prohibited.
Some of this was surely just liability reduction gone mad, but the totality of it felt like a tool to limit the career options of employees. Some kind of Kafkaesque talent retention strategy.