The hyper-clouds are open source's friends

Opinion One of the knee-jerk arguments made by companies abandoning their open source roots is that they can't make money because the bad hyper-cloud companies "steal" their open source services. True, at one time, the hyper-clouds took more than they gave. That's often no longer the case.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), for example, is now one of PostgreSQL's biggest supporters and a major Rust backer. Others always have been. For example, without Google, Kubernetes doesn't exist.

While I was at Open Source Summit North America in Seattle, I was reminded of this when, in a keynote, Sirish Chandrasekaran, GM of Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), said: "For the PostgreSQL core server, AWS employs one core team member, six committers, and seven major contributors."

I'm a cynic, so I responded, "Really?" Further, Chandrasekaran stated that for PostgreSQL 16, AWS programmers were the number one code ...