[michaelt]

According to [1] "FreeRTOS remains open source, with no commitments. [...] FreeRTOS users are not required to be AWS customers in any way."

Most likely Amazon's motivation is that they can make sure FreeRTOS makes using Amazon's services very easy; there are some IoT offerings that can't connect to Amazon's services, (or at least can't connect easily) [2]

By making sure FreeRTOS can easily pull in the right libraries, they can make it easier for people to connect devices to AWS without compromising on secure encryption.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/announcing-freertos-... [2] Last time I checked, Amazons MQTT service required TLS1.2 and an esp8266 only supported TLS1.1

[ronsor]

The latest axtls port for esp8266 supports TLS 1.2.