> App Mesh uses the open source Envoy proxy, making it compatible with a wide range of AWS partner and open source tools.

Yet another Amazon product based on open source software, while still contributing almost nothing to this space.

https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/blob/master/LICENSE

Permissions: Commercial use, Modification, Distribution, Patent use, Private use

rocgf

Apologies, I'm not sure if you are disagreeing with me in any way or not. :)

Envoy is indeed open source and freely-available for corporations to use. That is not what I was implying.

Amazon, out of all the big companies (Google, Netflix, Microsoft etc.), is the one with the least contribution to the open source world, despite using many of open source tools to build their AWS products.

cthalupa

Is this really true, though? Looks like Amazon has multiple github accounts with lots of projects, including some high profile ones like Firecracker, etc.

This has become a bit of an interesting topic to me because it keeps being brought up by people who sort of just state it as fact without providing any real argument. How much is enough? One full time developer? Ten? What if the project doesn't want to merge their contributions? Amazon just got killed on HN for open sourcing all of their ElasticSearch work in a separate repository.

I feel like they can't win on open source with some of you guys.

jacques_chester

https://medium.freecodecamp.org/the-top-contributors-to-gith...

On these figures, Amazon is behind other giants and has fewer contributions that a number of midsize tech companies like Red Hat or Pivotal (my employer).

cthalupa

It looks like that's missing data - including some very big ones. https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker has quite a few stars and came out in 2018 - no mention. All three of them have contributed to the Linux kernel in significant fashions, and it's not listed for any of them, despite the 72k stars.

And are github repos and stars the only way to measure open source contribution? The Xen project only has 162 stars, yet I don't think anyone would say it isn't an important project, and it's one Amazon has contributed to - if you're using a PV guest on Xen that's protected against Meltdown, chances are high you're using the Vixen mitigation that Amazon released.

Could Amazon do more? Probably. I'm not trying to say they're perfect. But this idea that they don't contribute back to open source seems pretty flawed, even by the data in your link, which seems incomplete.