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by cycloptic 1912 days ago
To the contrary, if Amazon is providing a good hiring funnel for the developers/maintainers, regularly contributing patches back upstream, providing funding to the project's non-profit, and generally respecting the license, then what's the problem? I'm no fan of Amazon but how can I complain about them having a right to profit in cases where they actually are being good open source citizens? Are they really any different from any other cloud provider in that respect?
2 comments
eeZah7Ux 1912 days ago
Amazon is well known for having a very restrictive policy for contributing to FOSS
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_msw_ 1912 days ago
Disclosure: I work for AWS, but I am not speaking for my employer. This post is based on my personal workplace experience.

The policy exists to enable collaboration and contribution, not to restrict it. These types of policies are common at companies like Amazon. Google has posted theirs publicly [1], and Amazon policies are similar. I have used the policy to contribute to more than one "upstream" open source software package, for example the Xen hypervisor [2].

Though I wish I had more recent commits, this should demonstrate that even in 2012 patches were flowing to Xen. More work on Xen by others can be found by searching for "amazon.co" in the commits [3].

[1] https://opensource.google/docs/

[2] http://xenbits.xen.org/gitweb/?p=xen.git&a=search&h=HEAD&st=...

[3] http://xenbits.xen.org/gitweb/?p=xen.git&a=search&h=HEAD&st=...

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phd514 1912 days ago
Case in point -- an AWS enhancement to PostgreSQL's connection pooler that could have been released as OSS with essentially no impact on RDS Postgres and yet: https://github.com/awslabs/pgbouncer-rr-patch/issues/3
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cycloptic 1912 days ago
I am not sure what the problem there is, that is a patch that carries a non open source license, which is allowed by the original ISC license of pgbouncer.
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pydry 1911 days ago
They contributed a tiny fraction of development resources and they reap a disproportionate amount of the profit.

Letting the status quo continue would just ensure that Amazon gets even richer off the hard work done by Elastic while development dries up. We all lose while they suck profit out of this product.

It's not like they require elastic to survive. They're too big to fail. By being a dominant cloud provider they have a massive inbuilt advantage

Yes they are different to other cloud providers. They're big enough to throw their weight around and they do.

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