Category: Thought Leadership

FreeRTOS.org is a go-to resource for everything FreeRTOS, a leading real-time operating system (RTOS) for microcontrollers and small microprocessors. FreeRTOS.org provides open source resources, documentation, tutorials, demonstrations, blogs, and an active FreeRTOS community that started more than 18 years ago. Distributed freely under the MIT open source license, FreeRTOS is now downloaded every 170 seconds. […]

Behind every successful open source project, you’ll find a real problem that needed to be solved. In this post, I will explore one such example through the backstory of the AWS Cloud Development Kit, or AWS CDK for short. A big part of this story involves the impact of the Amazon culture and our approach […]

Sometimes the best open source contributions involve doing less, not more. For example, Charity Majors has posited, “The best senior engineers I’ve worked with are the ones who worked the hardest not to have to write new code.” It’s not that writing new lines of code is bad. No, it’s really a matter of keeping […]

Few things have changed the world more than the internet, and at the heart of the internet is the open source LAMP stack. LAMP, short for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP, enabled developers to build new, interactive web experiences that have changed the way we shop, communicate, learn, and more. In robotics, we’re on the […]

In recent months, open source technologies have helped universities and colleges around the world scale remote learning at an unprecedented rate. As educators sought online resources and collaboration tools, open source technologies provided a unique opportunity to scale their education in a fast and cost-effective way without compromising flexibility or quality. Additionally, these tools provided […]

Madelyn Olson may not be the most well-known of open source developers, but chances are you’ve benefited from her work. Olson is a new maintainer for and a longtime contributor to Redis, one of the world’s most popular databases and regularly touted by developers as the most loved. You’ve used Redis when on Twitter, GitHub, […]

Part 1—Open source builders: Getting started Part 2—Open source builders: Lessons learned This two-part article series is based on recent interviews with Alex Casalboni, Senior Technical Advocate at AWS, about his project AWS Lambda Power Tuning; Olaf Conijn, Principal Architect at Moneyou, about his project that is helping users more effectively build infrastructure; and Liz […]

Part 1—Open source builders: Getting started Part 2—Open source builders: Lessons learned Inspired by Matt Asay’s recent Open Source Builders series on The New Stack, I sat down and talked with three open source developers, project maintainers, and community contributors. I wanted to know why they joined or created their first open source projects, what […]

For an estimated 15 million developers, Jenkins is synonymous with countless iterations of collectible stickers of the iconic, non-assuming butler that have adorned their laptops all over the world. The butler is representative of the ubiquitous open source continuous integration (CI) technology that has quietly automated an endless set of development tasks for well over […]

September 8, 2021: Amazon Elasticsearch Service has been renamed to Amazon OpenSearch Service. Visit the website to learn more. In a 2001 interview, Brian Behlendorf, then president of the Apache Software Foundation, was asked to identify the most foundational right in open source—the thing that, if removed, makes open source not open source. His response? […]