Amazon's internal policies towards open source and side projects are incredibly restrictive (in my opinion). If Amazon doesn't really want its employees to engage with open source, how genuine are the motives here?
There have been a number of changes to Amazon's policies over the years, and personal participation ("outside activity") is really straightforward now. For the vast majority of cases you just need to submit a ticket with details, and then it is auto-approved.
For comparison, you can have a look at Google's open source policy on personal projects here: https://opensource.google.com/docs/iarc/
If you are an employee and have questions, drop me a line at msw at amazon.com
So the prospects of Amazon reimplement all the popular open-source software someday is viable?
Amazon's policy on outside activity is very reasonable.
But honestly, whether the companies are 'right' or not isn't my point, and I hope it's not what people take away from my ranting. I only wanted to make a point about the narratives around FOSS being destroyed. People chose to build businesses on open source; sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. That's all we're learning.
Contrary to reports of its death, open source is alive and well.