He gave them so much free labor

I dug up my original AWS account confirmation email from 2006 a while (years) back. Now I need to go find it again to see if I was earlier.

I just want to contrast this article on AWS to its Azure counterpart- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242.

2 companies have functionally similar products, but behaves completely different. One company makes technical decisions with security as the fundamental principal, while for the other company, security is not a consideration.

That attested EC2 instance rollout after ~2 decades was a nice joke LOL

20 years of giving love to a soulless corporation

The author calls it a 'joke' that Heroes are just unpaid Amazon employees, but reality doesn't become a joke just because it's funny. The asymmetry here is staggering. I find myself holding back private research because I don't want to provide free R&D for a value-extraction machine that is already efficient enough.

The author was at least dependency-driven in their contribution, but outside that kind of dependency, it's hard to justify contributing even 'in the open' when the relationship is this one-sided. Amazon in particular has done enormous damage to the economic assumptions that permissive open source once relied on. There's increasingly more projects adopting 'Business Source Licenses', precisely to prevent open work from becoming a free input into hyperscaler monetization.

These devs know Amazon is grabby and, at some point, the only dominant outcome their community contribution is upstream of is unpaid labor for a trillion-dollar entity that also diverts support and community engagement away from the original projects by funneling users into managed versions of the same software.

I remember many of these events as I was running FreeBSD a lot and subscribed to the mailing lists.

Why on earth would you give this monstrosity of a company so much free labour?

I get that volunteering is fun, but donating your time and competence to a hyper capitalist company is short sighted. I hope there was appropriate compensation, and I'm not including "early access".

Interesting how this history is about the edge cases and the unlikely risks that turn into real incidents. the systems scale faster than what we think about their safety.