AWS has announced a programme to support open source projects with relevance to the company and its customers with promotional credits for its services. 

Principal Open Source Technologist Arun Gupta and Operations Manager Vicente explained the initiative in a blog post mentioning the credits were typically used for testing, storage, or CI/CD purposes. First beneficiaries include the Rust and Julia programming languages, Java community project AdoptOpenJDK, Java component repository Maven Central, and a couple of projects hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Project maintainers thinking about applying will need an active AWS account and aren’t allowed to have invoices outstanding. Their software should be developed under an OSI-approved license, although those using other common licenses are encouraged to get in contact as well. The projects with the best chances of success are those owned by non-profits or foundations, with maintainers from multiple entities.

AWS asks for information on the account number, the amount of credits needed, and what they will be used for, to process any request. According to Gupta and Vicente the company will consider a project’s relevance to AWS and its users, as well as its leadership principles when deciding on worthy candidates. Those include points such as customer obsession, innovation, bar raising, ambition and high standards, which means it will probably look for similar qualities in the applying projects. 

Feedback will be given within 10 to 15 business days via email. Interested parties are advised that credits cannot be used retroactively and expire after a year.

While the supported projects seem to subscribe to the idea of AWS as patron of open source, other communities might beg to differ. Only in the last couple of months, open source projects changed their license to prevent the company from repackaging their services, while others got forked for not conforming to AWS idea of open source.