[justinsb]

I also started (non-trivially) contributing to OSS with OpenStack, and later switched to contributing to Kubernetes. I whole-heartedly agree with the points made here; these same observations really shaped how I chose to contribute to Kubernetes.

Trying to get all the AWS early adopters to abandon their investment and move to something else seemed like it was a huge barrier to adoption, so I started off contributing to the AWS support for kubernetes and making sure that kubernetes worked well there. But the pains of installing OpenStack from upstream were fresh in my mind, so I also contributed to make sure that kube-up worked well and then (as we outgrew that architecture) started the kOps project. My goal is that you should always be able to run OSS kubernetes from upstream, even if you just treat that as an insurance policy that gives you the confidence to use a managed service.

I think the miracle of kubernetes is that I was just one of a large number of people here, each of us bringing our past experiences to make kubernetes better in some way. And the community continues to grow with people each addressing their own painpoints, which does create a lot of churn/progress (depending on your perspective!) I'd say that the people that organized the community were the unsung heroes here, and I suspect they learned a lot from OpenStack as well.

[yrgulation]

> I started off contributing to the AWS support for kubernetes and making sure that kubernetes worked well there

In effect providing free work to amazon.

[stubish]

It is kind of the point with open software that, when you scratch an itch, others also benefit.