Yeah the software being bundled in default images is just a convenience.

Most places that are serious about using AWS will be shipping their own images anyway

If that were solely true, there would be a lot more competition in the field right now. Amazon, (and to a much lesser extent the other 2 big names, GCP and Azure) are so massive not because they have a lot of power (plenty of other companies like digital ocean or OVM have plenty of scaling power too)— but because the integrations between their products are so seamless. Most of that functionality has a foundation in FOSS software that they’ve built on top of.

Which, by itself, is fine. But their contributions to open source are very one-handed and pale in comparison to how much they benefit out of it.

Hell, my company is no different. They allocate one day out of the year as "open source day" where devs can contribute back to open source projects on company time. But it must be something we already use.

No personal development. No non-essential libraries.

We make literally millions off of these libraries and we don't even contribute monetarily.

If these companies gave even 0.01% of their revenue to these essential libraries, they'd never even have to ask for money.

I think their point (may be wrong) is that none of this high powered software would exist without the goodness of strangers. Tbf it probably wouldn't look like this without business / on the clock contributing either

True, but AWS and the cloud in general likely would've never evolved without top notch free software, i.e. Linux, because the cost would've been prohibitive. I am on a team that runs a small public cloud and there are many systems needed to support the cloud, it's not just the instances/VMs.