Comment by lamontcg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lamontcg | Hacker News Reader

>Though it was always incorrect to lambast AWS for “strip-mining” open source

Amazon absolutely strip-mined open source.

In 2001-2006 Amazon was all built on open source and had ditched HP and Digital Unix for Linux, RedHat, Apache, Xen, etc.

It was abusively hard to contribute back to open source projects, including the Linux kernel, and you had to get extensive signoff and review to ensure that you weren't giving away any IP with your lock order bugfix or whatever. There were also constant reminders and threats to not engage in open source discussion in any way that could leak company IP which created an atmosphere where it was much easier to just not participate at all. It was definitely very easy to pull open source into the company and very, very difficult to participate going the other direction.

Back when you were at Amazon, I was at Red Hat. (disclosure: I am at Amazon now, and have been for a bit over 13 years).

From my perspective when I was at Red Hat, Amazon was very much an IT consumer. Amazon was a _hugely_ important customer for Red Hat, even appearing on stage to give their testimony about the benefits [1]. It was a "lighthouse" customer that really opened some doors to selling Enterprise Software.

Part of what we sold to Amazon was being their connection "upstream". In 2001 it was quite unusual for an IT shop like Amazon to participate directly upstream. One benefit of being a customer of Red Hat's was: they will fix bugs and work upstream on your behalf.

It was a very reasonable approach in those days to use an existing contractual / support relationship with a vendor like Red Hat to deal with all of those details and complexities, which often required strong social connections among open source developers and maintainers working together upstream.

I think that over time as large companies shift to consume open source software directly from upstream, they have to build the capabilities and connections to participate directly rather than going through an intermediary like Red Hat. It can take a fairly long time to do that.

[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2577912/linuxworld--am...

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