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> This post is obviously from an engineer

Not really. The post is by Matt Asay who's title is Head of Open Source Strategy and Marketing. The post reads like an attempt at improving upon the negative image AWS has garnered in open source by making money on open source projects without paying, or sometimes without even crediting, the authors. Most recent examples include Headless Recorder[1] and before that Kafka, Elasticsearch etc.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24799660



Totally fair to critique me as a marketer (though that's not really what I do. The only time I've had a true marketing title was when I ran marketing at MongoDB), but I don't think some of the other criticism sticks. We've been contributing to Apache Lucene and Solr (which feed into Elasticsearch), as well as Elasticsearch, for a long time. See, eg, https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/amazon-giving-back-a....

As for Headless Recorder, we're working with Tim now. That was a miss on our part, one that I (and the team involved) regret. But I don't regret you and others calling us out when you feel we've done wrong. AWS is not a perfect company, but I've been gratified that people here (in my experience) want to do the right thing. Sometimes we need help figuring out what's right in a given situation (or, rather, what's the right way to help customers. Increasingly you'll see teams understanding that more upstream contributions might be the best way to help customers in the medium- and long-term, even when it's not necessarily the obvious way to help them in the short-term). So please keep helping us do better.




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