That’s difficult to discuss without knowing the details, but it’s hard to believe that there isn’t anything that is of use to someone outside of amazon, even other cloud providers. There must be some efficiency gains somewhere that would benefit the original software.

Maybe minimal benefits to other cloud providers, but hardly something you'd need in the core library. I think Amazon should contribute more to open source, but I certainly wouldn't think any company should release something that would only benefit it's competitors.