Doesn’t happen very often, but I agree with AWS. Open source has very much become a vendor-sponsored affair and there are fewer and fewer actual community-driven projects.
Inside AWS we have the concept of strategic open source projects. We require the business owner inside a service team to report on a quarterly basis about the health of those projects. We’re doing that so we know that they’re paying attention to it. We don’t want to learn that this thing that’s really important is maintained by a guy living in a basement on public assistance. That is not acting in the best interests of our customers.”
They could like pay the guy to maintain it, when they are making massive profits from it. But I know that would be too much to ask for from Amazon
I do see a scenario where the project becomes tainted because of it. Not really sure how to approach this as maintainers definitely need to get reimbursed in some way.
I wonder if some kind of not for profit organization could act as a benefactor to important open source projects. So people can just donate to this organization, maybe even give monthly or whatever, and the organization doles out the funds to open source projects based on the amount of maintainers and importance to the community at large.
Like a charity for open source. They’d have to operate with complete transparency and justify their actions to avoid accusations of corporate favoritism, but I think it would be doable.
Does something like this already exist?
Not that I know of, but it sounds like something that should. Like GiveWell, but instead of evaluating the impact of different charities, it does open source projects.
The issue really depends more on the open source project. Some might have the organizational ability to receive money, direct it to worthy uses, and self govern. Others are just one person projects that will die and splinter off when the person working on it no longer does so.
It’s all fine and dandy until another leftpad project implodes, disabling millions of websites.
Always had been. Apache et all successful projects almost always have corporate support.
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David Nalley is director of open source strategy and marketing at AWS and president of the Apache Software Foundation.
How is the relationship between AWS and the open source community evolving, bearing in mind things like the issues with Elastic, which resulted in the development of OpenSearch?
In days gone by, most open source projects were true community initiatives, whether it was the Apache web server or the Linux kernel, it was people who were coming together for a common cause.
“Our understanding of open source has started to change, and realising that, we have to measure and assess risk every time we take a dependency.
Another AWS open source project that has been taken up by others in what Nalley calls “strange and delightful ways” is Bottlerocket, a lightweight Linux distribution for containers.
“Our builder experience team maintains an internal package repository,” said Nalley, looking at things like the source of the software and the license.
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