[quicklime]

I see what you mean, but in this particular case, there are licenses that explicitly require the sort of attribution that the tweeter was asking for - e.g. the BSD license with the "advertising clause", or maybe the AGPL. For some reason, open source developers are choosing not to use these licenses, and complaining about it later.

If it were the case that AWS broke some unspoken social convention that is hard to legally enforce, I'd be more sympathetic. But it feels more like the author made a choice to license their software using Apache 2 over other licenses.

[dak1]

A lot of how people and even companies conduct themselves has as much to do with cultural norms as it does with strict legal requirements.

It looks like Matt Asay, the lead for the open source and marketing team at AWS, has already reached out and said he's looking into it (and thanked Tim for the contribution).

I think there's generally a cultural norm to recognize an individual's contributions in general, especially when freely given.

If the comments on here largely echoed that sentiment and demonstrated that it was a cultural norm, expect AWS (and others) to be more likely to adhere to it in the future — it costs almost nothing, but there's definitely a value in having a positive reputation.

We do have the capacity as a community to define and uphold such cultural norms. Laws and licenses are not as binary as code.