
Ask HN: How much does Amazon contribute to the open source community? - andrewstuart
Amazon seems a big consumer of open source technology.<p>Does it give much cash in support to open source projects?<p>Does it contribute much in other ways?
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cperciva
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 lots of free EC2 usage for development and
testing.

~~~
vertoc
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...

~~~
dudleydoright
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.

~~~
oneoffoneoff
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.

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

~~~
oneoffoneoff
I would rather work for a company that appreciates the value of my open source
involvement and encourages me to develop it further.

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K0nserv
One of the things that I am aware of them Open Sourcing are their chef
cookbooks used for opsworks([https://github.com/aws/opsworks-
cookbooks](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](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](https://github.com/aws/opsworks-cookbooks/pull/291) and
[https://github.com/aws/opsworks-
cookbooks/pull/281](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.

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henningschuster
Amazon doesn't contribute much to the open source community. Most of their
contributions happened around the XEN project which they use to power EC2.

~~~
Rapzid
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.

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andrewstuart
Sounds like "not much". Amazon is an open source leech.

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srean
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](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.

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markuman
Amazon has assume the Linux Kernel developers (~20) from AMD in
Dresden/Germany a few Yeats ago and is still hiring Kernel Developers in
Germany.

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thebiglebrewski
When the Echo came out, I created a proxy to add functionality
([http://alexaho.me](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...

~~~
caseysoftware
They integrated your code or the idea?

~~~
thebiglebrewski
Honestly, I have no way of knowing.

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mixologic
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](https://github.com/mtdowling) is the author,
and participates in the php framework interop group on behalf of Guzzle.

------
mgkimsal
On 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?

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zo1
[http://www.quora.com/Did-Amazon-ever-open-source-any-of-
its-...](http://www.quora.com/Did-Amazon-ever-open-source-any-of-its-software)

~~~
gaius
[http://www.quora.com/Does-Amazon-actively-avoid-
contributing...](http://www.quora.com/Does-Amazon-actively-avoid-contributing-
to-open-source-software-projects)

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runT1ME
This sounds like a _great_ argument for AGPL.

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vanessa98
They don't. They're classic free riders.

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hackercurious
Richard Stallman's personal site has lots of information about Amazon.

[https://stallman.org/amazon.html](https://stallman.org/amazon.html)

~~~
raverbashing
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

~~~
_delirium
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 of crazy AJAXy webapp that can't be
viewed offline, that might be inconsistent, but he doesn't.

However, I agree that page doesn't much have to do with whether Amazon
contributes to free software.

~~~
giancarlostoro
I never knew he did this, I sometimes do the same with websites I enjoy so I
can have archived backups.

~~~
_delirium
He has a bit on how he works here: [https://www.stallman.org/stallman-
computing.html](https://www.stallman.org/stallman-computing.html). He freely
admits that a lot of it is pretty idiosyncratic, though.

