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

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Apr 11, 2015, 8:25 PM UTC

dudleydoright wrote: post #15

vertoc wrote: post #6

Earlier 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…

Post by tzs » Sat, Apr 11, 2015, 10:48 PM UTC

mizzao wrote: post #38

jeorgun wrote: post #12

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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?

Post by Terretta » Sat, Apr 11, 2015, 11:30 PM UTC

xmcredpol wrote: post #50

vertoc wrote: post #6

Earlier 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...

Another former employee here. 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 learni…

Post by oneoffoneoff » Sun, Apr 12, 2015, 1:32 AM UTC

Terretta wrote: post #54

oneoffoneoff wrote: post #26

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I'm a prolific open source contributor, and I found it strange when Amazon tried to recruit me. Let me get this straight: you're scouting me because of all this open source stuff which you will now insist I abandon.

You don't have to abandon. You just have to check your ego and contribute anonymously, with full corporate backing.

Post by kerny » Mon, Apr 13, 2015, 6:56 PM UTC

giancarlostoro wrote: post #42

_delirium wrote: post #21

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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.