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by dodobirdlord 2051 days ago
It’s (literally) Google’s crosvm with some changes. AWS forked an existing codebase, made some changes that mostly consisted of removing functionality to tailor the VMM for their use case, and then made a big PR push about “open sourcing” Firecracker as though it was a project they built from scratch. The announcement devoted 1 sentence to the fact that it’s a crosvm fork, and that’s not even the only thing covered in that one sentence.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/firecracker-lightweight-vir...
1 comments
whoevercares 2050 days ago
Toy in what sense? It’s the backbone of most serverless offering from AWS.
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dodobirdlord 2050 days ago
Toy in the sense that it’s not a significant contribution to the open source community.

Edit: In comparison to the scale of Amazon and the scale of contribution of other similarly-sized tech companies. Firecracker would rank as a more major contribution in my book if it wasn’t a cut-down fork of a pre-existing (and still active!) project.

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anaganisk 2050 days ago
Define significant? If you're expecting every open source software user to push a million commits before they can be called "contributors" apart from Microsoft/Facebook I dont see any significant contributors.
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dodobirdlord 2050 days ago
The context up thread is that Amazon contributes a remarkably small amount to open source compared to the amount of code that Amazon produces and the amount of open source projects that Amazon depends on. Also I find it interesting that you don’t think that Microsoft and Facebook are comparable to Amazon.
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