"Vendors developing those open source products started accusing AWS of strip mining, i.e., reaping the benefits of the products, without contributing back to their development."
Linux contributions are not the best example, since it's GPL, and you pretty much have to contribute back to get your changes mainlined, and end-users can request your changes at any time.
Now, if they contributed back to FreeBSD, that would be meaningful, since they don't have to.
Amazon doesn't distribute Linux on server hardware (just consumer hardware like the Kindle) so they don't have to give back for server aspects of Linux like KVM, yet in the Linux kernel code, the Amazon employees are mostly submitting patches for things like KVM, not for Kindle hardware support.
It would surprise me if Amazon use FreeBSD, I thought they use Xen & Linux KVM exclusively?
It's truly awesome that I can send an email to Amazon
saying "we're seeing an odd performance issue here" and
get back "here's a FreeBSD kernel patch I just wrote which
provides a 10% performance boost".
And people claim that Amazon never contributes back to
open source...
"strip mine" is in the zdnet article linked above, have a look. (Resells without contributing back in any meaningful way, instead hurting the oss company financially).
"Destroyed" was an exaggeration, at least as of today.
However I like and use some of the oss projects Amazon strip mines -- if Amazon instead paid the oss companies a part of want Amazon makes, that'd let those oss projects hire more people, improve the software even more -- and that I would appreciate, and could be made in a mutually beneficial way I think.
This isn't a new problem, for eg web hosting companies have been selling Apache/PHP hosting for decades. Apache and PHP were made more useful because of that reselling rather than being negatively affected by it. I think the only difference now is these OSS companies are VC backed so they have to get huge growth to pay back their giant loans.
I watched a talk recently that argued that Amazon increases the size of the market available for the software the OSS companies are producing. So the pie increases in size and the result is likely to be more money available for the software, not less.
The OSS companies you refer to are more about using OSS as the new shareware, a loss leader or poison pill to sell proprietary software, their business model isn't about open source at all.
> 'the only difference now is these OSS companies are VC backed so they have to get huge growth'
That's a good point.
> their business model isn't about open source at all.
(What do you consider open source biz models?)
> OSS as the new shareware
I think I understand what you mean. At the same time, in my case using only the OSS parts of the open core software, has been more than what I've needed
> I watched a talk recently
That talk sounds interesting, ... If you remember the name or speaker maybe I can find it?
It wasn't the talk I was thinking of, but this NextCloud talk discusses various OSS business models and mentions the AWS vs VC-OSS issue, especially during the questions section.
The Postgres git repo doesn't make it easy to discover the employer of the commit authors, but yes, they do send patches to Postgres, here is a search of commits referencing mailing list discussions started by Amazon, plus a couple of examples of where they sent patches:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-and-commercial-open-sou...
"Vendors developing those open source products started accusing AWS of strip mining, i.e., reaping the benefits of the products, without contributing back to their development."