[sauceop]

Speaking as someone who makes a living contributing to open source, it's a frustrating trend that the major cloud providers (Amazon being the worst offender) have decided that it's in their interests to take open source projects and never contribute back or even interact with the community.

It's less clear to me whether this is rational on their part - whether the incentives have actually changed. It's generally been in companies' best interest to contribute back to open source projects they are building products around, because:

You need to contribute to projects to influence the direction of them.

And you will need to make changes or fixes to your version of the project, and the maintenance cost of an upstreamed patch is much lower than the cost of maintaining an ever-growing stack of custom patches.

I've seen companies before make the bet that they are better off forking a large project because they can "move faster". And it is true for the first year or two, but after a while the burden of keeping up with the backporting of changes from upstream takes multiple engineers spending large chunks of their time to keep up with.

In some cases you might be able to offset this just by hiring more engineers, but how many of the best engineers really want to work on backporting changes to a bizarro fork of an open source project? I suspect this is the bet the cloud providers are making - that they can grow the product fast enough to the point where they can throw money at it. We'll see how that works out for them.

[_msw_]

Hi,

I work for Amazon Web Services, and I will risk responding to the first and only comment from a brand new account.

Amazon does contribute back and does interact with open source communities. You can find information on AWS's open source activities here: https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/

The page hasn't been updated for some of the latest news, such as releasing the Firecracker virtualization technology as open source: https://firecracker-microvm.github.io/