Comment by hintymad
4 years ago
Do people assume that a company as large as AWS would automatically have a lot to contribute to the OSS? Maybe most of Amazon teams have not much to open source yet. Contributing to OSS is a bottom-up effort. An engineer needs to be motivated to generalize her project, to peel the code from Amazon's vast internal infrastructure, and to go through an approval process to open source her project. Given that many teams have razor-sharp focus on delivering features, for good or for bad, I was wondering how many engineers are really motivated enough to open source something internal.
I don't think it's a bottom up process. I feel often it's a top down process. Most companies with lots open source activity normally have management that have decided that is something they want to encourage and then it comes down to people making their code open sourcable.
It is both a top down process and the culture of the company itself. In the real world, we know how big tech open-sourced some of the most efficient technologies that empowered hundreds, if not millions, of startups.
I wish this long process that's exhausting in Amazon applies when it comes to cloning open source projects to get more profits.
You don't need to assume. Amazon's Open Source team regularly talks about how much they do for open source in my companies Slack. It's their own words.