[_msw_]

There is no spin here. There are people that work for Amazon that work on FOSS projects out of the goodness of their heart, just like folks who are independent developers, or folks who work for startups, or folks who are just getting started.

When a FOSS maintainer tells you they sometimes do work on the weekends for the love of the community [1] you believe them. The evidence (with timestamps!) is there for all to see in the pull requests and commit history.

[1] https://twitter.com/reconditerose/status/1770697315671535707

[xuancanh]

I think the industry's criticism of AWS is understandable, msw. I believe it is time for AWS to come up with a more sustainable method to support the open-source community. By sustainable, I mean financial support and dedicated resources for contributing back to open source. Given your position, I hope you can initiate this type of change. Allocating 0.5 or 1% of AWS's revenue or even profit from each service that utilizes open-source software is unlikely to significantly affect the financial statements, yet it would represent a significant contribution to the open-source community.

[_msw_]

We’ve done that. See one example in a sibling reply.

[Dylan16807]

Having an example of doing that is great, but the comment said "each". For example, it matters if Redis got such an offer.

[xuancanh]

What I meant is a systematic approach to review and reconsider the support mechanisms for all of AWS's current open-source offerings, including those that AWS uses behind the scenes but does not disclose to the public, not just a few services or examples.

[arp242]

Countering a criticism of how Amazon interacts with the projects it uses to drive a large section of its profit with "don't dimish the work FOSS maintainers!" absolutely is a spin. Or some other bad-faith behaviour. It sure as hell isn't a meaningful engagement with the core issues, is it?

> There are people that work for Amazon that work on FOSS projects out of the goodness of their heart

So they work for free then?

Didn't think so.

They just have a job they like. That's great. But lots of people have jobs they like. And lots of people work on weekends. But don't try to spin this as an act of altruism, because it's not.

[LightFog]

Without denying the good intentions and inputs of the individuals going above and beyond to contribute - AWS as a whole contribute peanuts to these projects relative to what they make from them - they have it in their power to make these projects sustainable via healthy revenue sharing but don’t.

[_msw_]

You write as if you have all the facts, but I doubt you do.

There are services with varying partnership terms, and there have been services launched with an intent to build long term mutually beneficial relationships that help ensure FOSS projects are well resourced.

“AWS, working with Grafana Labs, will be contributing licensing revenue and code to help make Grafana even better, not just for the AWS service, but also for open source users and Grafana Cloud customers.”

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/how-aws-and-grafana-...

[LightFog]

You are right - I don't have the details on Amazon's agreements with FOSS projects - have you made them public?

All I have to go by are AWS's huge profits and the continuing struggles of FOSS projects involved with AWS to develop sustainable business models.

[cowsandmilk]

> make these projects sustainable

You’re just showing your ignorance of redis. The project is sustainable without the company as the vast majority of work on the project is done by those who don’t work for the company.

What isn’t currently sustainable is the company. That’s all.

[LightFog]

In that case you will have to excuse my conflating this special case with the multitude of other projects the same thing has happened to in the past and will likely continue happening to. I will watch with interest on how the contributors self-organise and prevent the exact same thing happening to whatever fork comes out.

[NovaX]

RedisLabs actually was a somewhat hostile takeover of the project by a complete outsider. It commercialized Redis prior, kept trying to trademark the project name, change the company name to RedisDB to confuse users. A few of those attempts were halted by antirez and the community, but after they had thousands of customers he relented. At the time he complained about his own financial challenges and reluctance, but it gave him a just reward at the cost of legitimizing RedisLabs. The history of that company was always as exploitive to Redis OSS and feigning being good citizens. While you may be right in general, this is actually a case of those exploiting OSS winning.