Amazon Web Services (AWS) is extending its promotional credits toward open source projects that run within the AWS ecosystem. The move is notable as the cloud giant has racked up some bad debt with a number of open source companies regarding how it uses open source projects within the AWS cloud.

The extension moves on AWS’ already standing promotional credit offer. To get the credits, a user needs an active AWS account, and the company explained that eligible projects “generally” need be licensed under an Open Source Initiative (OSI)-approved license. However, it added that “commonly-used licenses” that are not OSI approved should also apply for possible recognition.

Arun Gupta, principal open source technologist at AWS, noted in the blog post that these credits are typically used for upstream and performance testing, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD), or storage of artifacts on AWS.

“We hope this program will free up resources for open source projects to further expand and innovate in their communities, as several projects are already doing,” Gupta wrote. He added that AWS will use its “Leadership Principals” to help select which open source projects can use the credits and that it will “generally favor projects with maintainers from multiple entities or that are owned by foundations or non-profits.”

Dan Kohn, executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), espoused support for the move.

“We’re very appreciative of AWS making this substantial contribution of cloud promotional credits to CNCF-hosted projects,” Kohn wrote in the blog post. “CNCF projects rely on cloud promotional credits for their [CI/CD], which is essential for maintaining their high development velocity.“

AWS is a “platinum” member of CNCF.

AWS rival Google earlier this year launched its integrated Open Source Ecosystem as a way to endear the company with the open source community. That program, which was announced at the vendor’s Next event, is designed to make it easier for enterprise customers to find and use software licenses from ecosystem members by putting them in a single user interface and offering them as fully managed services running in Google Cloud. Google also offers unified billing so customers get one invoice from Google Cloud that includes the open source partner’s service, as well as support for most of the partners, allowing users to manage and log support tickets in a single window instead of with multiple different providers.

In announcing the program, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian took a swipe at AWS, which is often perceived as having a tense relationship with the open source community.

“Recently the open source community has found that cloud providers are not partnering with them but attempting to take away their ability to monetize open source,” Kurian said. We at Google do not believe that is good for customers, for the development community, or for software innovation.”

AWS often takes popular open source projects developed by other coders and companies, packages them as proprietary services, and then sells them to customers, much to the consternation of some companies.