I think the author seriously underestimates how complex the large distributed systems are, and how much specialized knowledge does it take to maintain it.<p>If Amazon releases the entire AWS source code and configs tomorrow, one is not going to bring up an AWS competitor any time soon. The released configs are not going to be usable as-is, as no one will have 81 datacenters with millions of servers. The configuration will need to be scaled down significantly, and a lot of this stuff is not documented and could only be managed by the members of the team which wrote it.<p>As an another example, take Kubernetes. It is a replacement of a small part of Google’s infrastructure, and a lot of people already consider it too complex. So even if we force someone to release the scripts, but those scripts require kubernetes, a large fraction of users will just have to ignore those because they don’t use the tech.