How AWS Takes Advantage of Open Source Projects

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This gameplay has not a name in the table of Wardley’s gameplays, but it’s something that is happening in an ongoing basis.

The map

The steps

Typically Open Source projects start as response to a specific technical problem, and if that problem to be solved is common, both: community and product grows.

Some of these projects, not too much, expand in a way that becomes standard for a specific problem or scenario. For these few products, the community and the core teams behind the scene are very happy and proud of the journey.

Step 1 Open source project becomes standard and it’s supported by volume of installations.

AWS decides to build the capability

1.- AWS analyze the impact of this Open Source product by different perspectives:

  • Size of the community.
  • Expansion of the product.
  • Level of use by AWS users.
  • Etc

2.- Build a team of experts in the product, world class people.

3.- Once done they create a fork and adapt to turn it into a AWS service that can be consume through the AWS console.

Implicitly, they make it proprietary, breaching the standard licenses that the work done over a Open Source product, should be also public so the community can benefit from the advances done by others (that are community too).

Disclaimer: I know, there are many Open Source type of licenses, and not all of them are subjected to make it available to others.

Here it’s important to remark too, that during this process the AWS team can benefit from releases of community (cheaper maintenance). What is also true is that the speed of evolution that the community can do could be faster than the work done by a restricted/individual team.

Usually, from the commercial point of view, AWS will do the go to marketing campaign to position their new service into the different layers of their commercial ecosystem. This, in addition to the clients and partners aware of the product life cycles, use to make the traction of use to grow at good speed.

This provides AWS a clear new thread of revenue which intellectual property is clearly broken, but it is not possible to demonstrate as AWS do not explain how these services are implemented.

AWS decommission the service

When the volume of clients is low, or the software is being deprecated, the service is dismantailed with enough time for the clients to move to other service (usually available in AWS too).

AWS Open Source Community

This is an old program where they are trying to contribute to build a community where open source projects born, grow or mature.

Examples

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