AWS documentation is now open source and on GitHub

In general, I'm happy supporting a company that pushes the bounds rather than fretting over every little detail. If something doesn't work exactly as documented, I probably found a rather unique case. I'd rather struggle with the problem for an hour and suggest a fix, than have X, Y, or Z company pay someone to spend countless hours finding every possible edge case.

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On top of that, there is a hugely beneficial conversation that often arises from the opening of issues. I've found that one of the best ways to engage in a meaningful discussion with a company is to open an issue on one of their code repos. Engineers are often more straight to the point than "marketing" or "business" types.

1. They can add their contributions to their resumes. 2. They use the software and more than likely reference the docs, and so are already stakeholders that desire the content to be correct and so will happily fix it given the chance so that they can save themselves headaches in the future. 3. The general concept of 'open source' is very enticing and is almost always has a positive connotation, so very few people will see that this is a clever way to cut costs and net free labor and not really the virtuous public gesture of transparency and good will a lot will perceive it to be.

This would be different if, like actual open source software others could pull the thing and conceivably make a better version of it and compete, but since this is necessarily bound to a product that's not going anywhere outside the organization, it's de facto always going to be free labor for amazon and never going to promote potential forking out of modified versions of the project, further securing the companies foothold in the market as well--after all, if you no longer have to pay folks for all the extra bits like documentation, support, and maintenance of internal libraries, you can have nothing but a horde of devs working on the user-facing product, and ensure all of your money goes toward nothing other than squashing the competition. Sure you could argue it's still technically possible for someone's fork to gain bigger traction than the official amazon repo, but cmon now, the project is so massive and is so bound to the company that such a scenario is highly unlikely. On the plus side, open sourcing is a boon for archivists were the main content to ever disappear (unlikely).

I realize this sounds a little bleak, and I'm sure amazon also has good intentions with this move, but I can't help but see the potential for future markets where a lot of free labor is snagged under the banner of 'open source' simply because people are shortsightedly seeking resume boosts and not realizing that contributing labor freely will more than likely hurt the job market in the long run.

Not saying you shouldn't contribute to open source, nor is the idea of open source a bad one, but I think the lines get a bit blurred when it comes to open source projects owned by private (massive, in this case) corporations who are then gaining from the work of outsiders without needing to compensate them. Sure, helping out looks good on your resume, just as unpaid internships do--but at some point we need to take a look at these practices that can be, whether intentionally or not, ways of sidestepping the proper dispensation of wages and compensation for labor.

They may still need to pay somebody to green light merges, but that's a lot less costly, I imagine, than paying a team of writing professionals.

If this collaborative-documentation initiative were launched as an Amazon-hosted wiki, editors or mods could shut me down. But since it's open source and under a Creative Commons license, Amazon has essentially no control over how much I vandalize the content.

Fortunately for AWS, I'm not really interested in vandalizing the content or misleading people. But the fact that someone can create a knock-off site riddled with errors, and Amazon can't claim copyright infringement if the site plays by the Creative Commons rules, is concerning, isn't it?

Edit: I know, I know. It's already possible to make unauthorized copy-pasta sites. But at least Amazon would have the ability to threaten the site's owner or hosting provider with copyright infringement claims. That option disappears when you release your official documentation under a Creative Commons license.