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This article mainly explains "what is the reason why AWS is not open source". The content in the article is simple and clear, and it is easy to learn and understand. Please follow the editor's train of thought to study and learn "what is the reason why AWS is not open source".

Some people say that AWS is the largest cloud service provider, but not the largest open source contributor, which makes some people very upset.

For example, yaron haviv, founder of Iguaz.io, says that AWS's so-called open source is just pretending, unlike Google.

This is not accurate enough. For example, in terms of the extensible deep learning framework MXNet, AWS has 400 developers contributing 40% of the code. But that doesn't seem to be enough, and some analysts say that although AWS has contributed a lot, it's not nearly as much as AWS gets from open source.

However, this statement is also unfair.

In fact, no company says that it is for charity to open up its own code, and open source is often for the benefit of the company's long-term development. For example, some companies expand their ecology through open source, while others can do business around open source, such as doing open source software and selling related hardware.

AI of AWS and Matt Wood, general manager of Deep Learning, said in an interview that AWS's strategy is to study technologies that can only be developed by companies that are not short of money, and then bring them to the general public.

This idea and practice is the same as that of many top companies, such as IBM, such as Apple, which consistently recruit the best and brightest R & D personnel to make competitive products and achieve success in the market.

I have to admit that open source is just a way for AWS to democratize technology. However, AWS believes that for most developers and employees in the enterprise, open source is not really the most important thing.

AWS's attitude towards open source

Recently, AWS and Microsoft have launched an open source Gluon, a project to improve the efficiency of developers. AWS competes with Microsoft, but this kind of cooperation is common for such large companies. Microsoft has tried its best to introduce its open source efforts to the outside world in recent years, in large part because of Microsoft's poor reputation in the open source world.

There is no such historical reason for AWS, so there is no rush to prove its sincerity in open source to the outside world. Critics argue that AWS has little accumulation in open source, and it is inappropriate to emphasize how much AWS benefits from open source.

Matt Wood says it is often heard that machine learning has a lot of room for development, and many people talk with anticipation in their eyes, but many companies don't know where to start.

One possible way is for AWS to share the code of machine learning for everyone to learn and to master the methods of machine learning. This approach seems reasonable, such as Google's open source TensorFlow, which has been a great success.

But Matt Wood says it's too unAWS.

So, what is the form of AWS's service? Wood introduces the service strategy of AWS at three levels through machine learning technology:

The first tier provides "black box" products such as Polly and Lex. These services are aimed at developers with limited data to help them train machine learning models. These developers do not need to build their own complex machine learning environment and leave them to AWS.

The second level is for another group of users, who have enough data to train machine learning models, but do not want to spend time buying their own boxes and piecing together their own infrastructure. Such users are most likely to use the S3 bucket and an engine that can run these models.

The third level is open source, which opens all kinds of packages and libraries to the outside world and puts the neural network into the hands of the public. In this case, AWS contributes to the open source community on the one hand and optimizes projects running on AWS on the other. Wood said that we are not directly involved in open source projects like MXNet for profit, just because our users want to use these, and we want the effect to run as well as possible when users want to use these applications.

Why isn't AWS open source?

What annoys critics is the part of "optimizing on AWS".

Out of some natural goodwill of human nature, it is not right to think that AWS should open source code instead of always doing things for revenue data.

First of all, AWS is a commercial enterprise and must be responsible for its own interests. While taking care of interests, goodwill can be taken into account at the same time, but the question is: how to balance their own economic interests and natural goodwill, as well as the interests of users? This is a problem that all companies have to solve when faced with open source problems.

On the other hand, AWS does not push only its own things in a closed way. take databases as an example, AWS not only supports MySQL, but also cooperates with Oracle and Microsoft in order to make these databases run better on AWS and provide services for customers.

On the other hand, AWS participates in the open source community. In the area of machine learning, for example, AWS has a team participating in open source projects such as MXNet,TensorFlow, in order to make these projects run better on AWS, and provide developers with more freedom, flexibility, and a wider range of choices. The recent partnership with Microsoft to do Gluon is also a continuation of this strategy.

In the early days of machine learning, developers of machine learning had to know many technical details. Therefore, AWS provides different services for different levels of users, rather than imposing only one service on users. It is undoubtedly advantageous to give a variety of options and options, and this early openness is very common in the open source world.

Is AWS selfish? Yes, can this selfishness help good programmers and enterprise software developers? Yes, and the help is not a by-product, it's exactly what AWS wants.

More crucially, AWS sees that what most users need is not more open source, they only focus on how service providers like AWS and Microsoft can more easily access the power of AI, not in what way.

These services are not open source, but that's not the point. For users, what matters is how to run open source code more easily and how to enter the world of machine learning more easily. What AWS does gives value to customers, and AWS naturally gains success in the end.

Thank you for reading, the above is "what is the reason why AWS is not open source", after the study of this article, I believe you have a deeper understanding of the reason why AWS is not open source, and the specific use needs to be verified in practice. Here is, the editor will push for you more related knowledge points of the article, welcome to follow!

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