A lot of the "free labor for Amazon" framing in this thread misses the core dynamic here. Colin wasn't doing charity work, he was making FreeBSD run on EC2 because Tarsnap literally depends on it. That's probably the healthiest model for open source contribution: you fix the infrastructure your own product sits on, and everyone downstream benefits too. The alternative is waiting for Amazon to care about your niche platform, which could mean waiting forever. It's a different calculus than, say, an indie dev writing a library that AWS wraps into a managed service.