It sounds like Google want to continue maintaining the Istio project under the guise of something called the Open Usage Commons.
The other two projects under that are Angular and Gerrit, two other Google products.
IBM's disappointment stems from the fact that they feel Istio is also their baby and that it was suppose to goto the CNCF one day, not Googles own umbrella foundation.
I think the same. Google for the most part want their names associated with these products rather than being something community driven.
While I generally believe in Google's altruism in their open source contributions, that good faith does not carry forward to any of their open source initiatives when it comes to Google Cloud.
Maybe I'm cynical, but it seems pretty obvious to me that Google embraces OSS with Istio, Kubernetes, etc only out of necessity and being a distant 3rd in the Cloud race, and this is their attempt at some sort of differentiator.
I don't see altruism, but alignment of different interests.
Summer of Code is a huge project they finance, seems altruistic but is a recruiting&marketing tool.
Publishing libraries like protobuf and abseil serves to drive standards in directions they like.
Chrome/Chromium drives the open web, ensures their say on standards and gives the ability to set them.
Android/AOSP brings leadership in mobile devices to them. Again driving standards to their needs and preventing Apple from making the mobile world a google-free walked garden.
SDKs for their services - obvious.
And to be clear, that is by no means bad. And that potential abuse of their position has to be controlled (i.e. when setting web standards to their likings) is mostly independent from their software being open or not.
Well, they are still part of a hierarchy serving the goals of the owners (which for a public company means profit) of course that boils down to different things in different groups and I listed different goals for different projects they are involved in. But on a first assumption I, as an external, don't care much about internal structures. (Maybe I care a bit about Google vs. Alphabet, but not by much)
Some open source projects might also be (partially) for employee retention. Letting some high-performing developer(s) open source internally developed projects because it is what they want to do. Might be particularly relevant for developer tooling where commercial potential is generally quite low.
For abseil this is a bit simpler, so I start there: On the one hand it is a library they publish so that other libraries they publish (Googletest, protobuf, ..) can use it on the other hand it drives development of the C++ standard and adoption according to their needs ("see our hashmap is faster and more efficient, make it part of the standard! (Then we don't have to maintain it anymore, but compiler vendors will)")
With things like protobuf/grcp it's a bit harder, but if they define the standard for data exchange between machines they can eventually
- use it as apart of their search indexer
- incorporate external services into their products while keeping their standard architecture
- integrate acquired software into their stack (you hope being acquired by google? Prepare ;) )
- it reduces risk of alternative approaches from becoming defaults, which could harm Google's integration wishes
- if job candidates are used to protobuf there is one thing less to reach a new hire
This certainly isn't a conclusive list, and I can't judge relevance of each for their decision, but those things certainly impact the decision aside from "we think it's cool"
I don't understand why everything any company does has to either be 100% altruistic or 100% out of greed. Why can't there be a middle ground? Obviously they see the value of open source, especially with projects like TensorFlow, but at the same time, after having spent so much resources developing these, they still want to reserve some control so that their investment can stay useful and agile to their needs. That seems reasonable, and it's not readily obvious that open-governance is the best solution for every project.
There is no such thing as corporate altruism. It is all greed. For all companies.
When a company open sources something, you're right, they "see the value of open source". They know it will enable collaboration, essentially unpaid labor on their project, community and interest, and while others can use it, it places them at the center in a driving power position over the technology and gives them the ability to set the standard.
Open sourcing is good business. And that's before we talk about the marketing value of claiming it's altruistic and selling that idea to everyone else. Once you start taking advantage of people's naivety to promote your company and your brand, you're really cooking with gas.
People need to stop believing in corporations, because corporations are built for the purpose of making money. You can trust them insofar as you understand that goal and understand them to move in accordance with it.
Not everything open sourced is a corporate decision. Frankly, a lot of employees have 20% pet projects, and smaller open source projects tend to be engineers pet projects and the individuals releasing them tend to not care about the business use case, they tend to want to share and show what they have written to the external community.
And having worked on Google OSS projects, the 'unpaid labor' aspect often doesn't materialize. Looking at GWT , J2CL, Closure Compiler for example, 99% of all commits are from Googlers, very few outside contributions, despite for example, a peak of 150k MAUs for GWT in its heyday.
Google has 10s of thousands of OSS projects, only a small fraction of them are related to any kind of strategy. Most are people scratching an itch and throwing a codebomb over the wall onto GH.
But even your 20% pet projects are allowed to be done and open sourced as a point of retaining employees, which is viewed as a perk that presumably provides the company value.
If Google didn't think 20% projects provided value in terms of employee satisfaction and retention, or didn't find some value in the ability to potentially build on some of that random unplanned R&D if someone struck gold, Google wouldn't do it.
It's possible to have altruistic line employees, but corporations are always acting on cost/benefit. That benefit just doesn't always manifest directly into cash. Employee retention, good PR, etc. are all benefits that can be to some degree valued and measured.
You attribute too much to management, as if everything not expressly forbidden is omitted for a reason.
Corporations do not have 100% visibility into what their employees are doing in totality and they often don't write any rules for or against something until after an employee does something so bad it creates negative PR.
There's no employee handbook rule that tells me I can comment on HackerNews, or tells me that I can't (well, I hope not). So until I get a call from Google HR telling me I did something bad on HN, I do it.
I don't think this is Google specific, I don't think the vast majority of employees in the tech sector obtain permission for both after hours contributions they make on the internet, or even stuff they do while at work, even though most companies have a policy not to use work computers for personal things.
People just don't compartmentalize their lives like that. Like say you're at the office, you're browsing some GitHub repo on a project completely unrelated to your company, and you notice an easy to fix bug, and send in a PR on your work desktop while at the office. Is your company allowing you to do this explicitly, or do they just not care, as long as you're being responsible and not spending all day at the office working on non-work stuff and not deliverables.
The COVID era brings this even more into focus, with everyone working from home now, really, how many people are doing other work during office hours?
You're trying too hard to attribute master planning to management, when the truth is, most of these tech companies are more chaotic and autonomous internally then most people realize.
I disagree. Let's assume you're correct though. Open source altruism is a fantastic opportunity for greed. Especially when it comes to big companies. Doing good deeds for community projects drives the good will engine for your core business.
Let's say you're the maintainer of the `ls` command. Some Facebook employee comes along and fixes a bug, out of the goodness of his heart. You're going to think, wow, Facebook is helping me, now I trust Facebook more.
Problem is incentives. If Facebook gets large enough, its employees who are trying to stake a claim in open source might not be thinking about how that ties into the company as a whole, if leadership isn't rewarding it.
>I don't understand why everything any company does has to either be 100% altruistic or 100% out of greed.
With all discourse on the internet IMO there's way too much all one thing or another. Companies and people made lots of decisions surrounding various projects, and the reasons can be altruistic one day, about profit the next, or a little of both with the same decision.
I suspect Google felt they got burned with Kubernetes - doing a lot of the initial development, donating it to the CNCF and then not profiting much from it (e.g. still being distant 3rd in cloud).
Google did profit massively from kubernetes, moreso than any other big company (Hello Red Hat lol)
It was (for better and for worse) the #1 reason to adopt GCP for our main cloud platform, and we're not alone.
It's has seen immense adoption that it wouldn't have had if it hadn't been in a neutral foundation. The work was definitely not done by Google alone (~30%).
IS GCP "still" #3 ? Yes.
Is it because they didn't get a tighter grip on k8s and try to use it as a competitive advantage ? absolutely not.
Nobody would have touched k8s with a 10 foot pole in that situation.
The strength of k8s is in its eco-system and that wouldn't have happened without the CNCF.
And I'm saying this as an early adopter of k8s, it's insane for the Google brass to see anything other than an immense success in the handling of k8s, at least from the perspective of how much money it made Google (indirectly)
It's not because of K8S strategy that GCP is #3.
It's just because MS & AWS are better. PERIOD.
Better at service, better at marketing, better at some product design sometimes, better at abusing their current dominant position (hehe it sucks doesn't Goog ? heh? Doesn't it ?)
I think you underestimate the revenue OpenShift is generating... If I see the support contract bills of my clients, holy crap, you could host a ton of stuff on GCP for that.
Disclaimer: I'm a Red Hat consultant but this is entirely my own opinion
Comparing consulting bills to IaaS bills is apples/oranges. Consultants are really just Humans as a Service (HaaS). A lot of the work we do is to bring in expertise in something that would otherwise be difficult and expensive to hire for and augment a team for a short period. We actually help customers with cloud-stuff (like AWS and Azure) all the time.
A lot of the work I've been doing lately is stuff that would have to be done if you were using K8s on cloud instead of OpenShift. I'm currently helping to migrate services from older platforms (like BlueMix) to OpenShift. You can look for that "feature" all day long in the cloud console, but you won't find it :-)
If I see the support contract bills of my clients,
holy crap, you could host a ton of stuff on GCP
for that.
yeah with no support lol, and when something goes wrong... oh well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
on a more serious note: in order to compare apples to apples you should compare red hat support bills with GCP support bills (i think they call that "professional services"). I guess they aren't cheap either.
> eah with no support lol, and when something goes wrong... oh well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Sadly, also my experience. Response SLA of 2 hours? Please attach sosreport is ALWAYS the first reply. Even if you attached it in the original ticket (which we always do). The technical quality of the support is sub-par, most of the time when we include technical information, they don't seem to understand it at all...
It's incredibly accurate though. One human remark shouldn't ruin a comment full of substance for you. This isn't a Reddit comment, it's an HN response with a tail of humanity.
i should check if it's still the case, but I remember a time where every effing kubernetes tutorial would make you spin up a k8s cluster on google cloud.
I remember learning about Kubernetes for the first time. Thought it sounded cool so I started looking into how to make my own cluster. I think every other tutorial was like: "next, go to CLOUD_PROVIDER and sign up for an account to make a cluster".
I'm trying to look up how to make my own cluster, not use someone else's. Figured it out eventually but it took way more searching then for learning how to use k8s.
To profit from cloud services at the level AWS/MS do, you need big customers, the long tail is just marketing that happens to make you some pocket money. To get big customers, Google's reputation for losing interest and moving into the next big shiny plays very hard against them.
How can you be so certain? The project is barely 6 years old and so many APIs are JUST reaching v1. And companies are still using mostly barebones K8s, we are yet to see how RedHat, Azure differentiate on top of it and we get to see all the "distros"
Cloud is still very much a blue ocean domain. Azure's rise has been driven by bringing in companies from the huge on-prem market into Cloud, not by attracting users away from AWS. We are nowhere near maturity level to even consider that current market leaders will stay in place for next 5 years.
Pretty much my feeling about the whole thing. It's someone's attempt within Google to not let the horse out so fast when there was a buck to be made on it.
Android brought people into Google's ecosystem.
Kubernetes could have positioned Google better in the cloud space but I think they were late to the party due to their failure to understand what customers want.
There's something of the older BSD/Unix engeineering culture all through google's technical sutff.
It's noticable through their documentaion and in some of their architectural decisions and general approach/attitude towards software engineering.
I've have noticed that it's faded somewhat but it's still there, it's noticable specially when contrasting it with Amazon's approach which has a different approach or style to it.
I think it has to do with the origins of older google engineers (this also would explain why/how it's diluted but still there)
Also it seems that in some parts of google are trying to move away from these in order to be seem more enterprise friendly?
But personally, I really like google's more engineer-oriented attitude (here are they pieces and how they are made, you can figure it out) versus a more hand-holding style which later makes it difficult to move beyond the happy path.
it's not very easy to explain what I mean exactly as it all comes from a rather vague sensation about engineering style.
Altruism or not - it's a very bad idea to handle rights over open-source trademarks by one US-based organization due to aggressive political interventions from the gov: e.g. gitlab case with discrimination over russian/chinese hires, case with github removing Iran accounts, etc.
Open-source should be extensively distributed over many actors to prevent any government censorship and attacks by political reasons.
Disclaimer: i work for Google Cloud and use istio daily.
I don't think this matters to practitioners, it's a solution to fix trademark issues.
Open Source Licenses (like Apache under which istio is released) doesn't solve the trademark (TM) issue, they are vague around this topic, so the use of the name/logo/mascot to release any sort of managed or supported solution based on an OSS tool becomes a hurdle, a lot of money is at stacks here (imagine if k8s was still under the control of Google, AWS or Azure will never be able to launch something called Kubernetes engine because there is a risk Google will sue them).
The problem with CNCF and why istio was not
transferred to that org is that CNCF acts as a mediator, so any decision around trademark takes soo much time and effort because CNCF has to get the blessing of everyone or build something neutral (like the k8s certification), and it's in their best interest that things are complicated as they can make money out of that.
The OUC was created to solve the TM issue and allow decisions to move fast, the usage guidelines haven't changed and will likely not change.
I do have to admit that myself i don't understand why no one from IBM is in the initial board of OUC
> acts as a mediator, so any decision around trademark takes soo much time and effort because CNCF has to get the blessing of everyone or build something neutral (like the k8s certification)
Sorry, but that's the nature of standardisation, and the price you pay if you want to show you're really vendor-neutral. For me, actions like these make Istio go from the almost de-facto default choice for a service mesh, to suddenly wanting to consider other stuff.
> and it's in their best interest that things are complicated as they can make money out of that.
I don't really see how money would be an issue here? CNCF is a non-profit, Google is not.
> Sorry, but that's the nature of standardisation, and the price you pay if you want to show you're really vendor-neutral. For me, actions like these make Istio go from the almost de-facto default choice for a service mesh, to suddenly wanting to consider other stuff.
That's not what the Cloud industry is about, it's about speed and time to market.
> and it's in their best interest that things are complicated as they can make money out of that.
Valid point, i have no evidence to support this, i just feel like CNCF looks for any opportunity to monetise itself for reasons i don't understand (Certifications, Conferences...). For a non profit that doesn't hire the core developers of the tools they support (most are hire by tech companies) i don't see why kubecon should cost 1k$+
> That's not what the Cloud industry is about, it's about speed and time to market.
Not sure how that's even an argument? Istio already was the de-facto standard, it is already in the market right now. Nothing prevented them from submitting to the CNCF - even if the acceptance would have taken a while. This wouldn't have suddenly stopped adoption or development in any way? It would only have enforced the view that the project was committed to stay vendor-neutral. Now, at least in my eyes, they've shown exactly the opposite.
> For a non profit that doesn't hire the core developers
Not sure why an organization formed to allow multiple vendors to work together on the same tools and play neutral party there would need developers. That would make them a stakeholder, something you want to avoid. They do have staff though[1], which also costs a lot of money, and organizing events isn't free.
"The problem with CNCF and why istio was not transferred to that org is that CNCF acts as a mediator, so any decision around trademark takes soo much time and effort because CNCF has to get the blessing of everyone or build something neutral (like the k8s certification), and it's in their best interest that things are complicated as they can make money out of that."
Also, I believe people have been asking Istio to develop a conformance program for years and moving it to CNCF which had a track record of building one of the most successful open source conformance programs seemed reasonable: https://github.com/cncf/k8s-conformance
If not CNCF, there are other fantastic open source foundations like the ASF, EF, OSI, SPI and so on that could have helped.
No one from IBM is on the board because Google wants to control the project and apparently has no interest in governing it in conjunction with non-Google entities
> IBM continues to believe that the best way to manage key open source projects such as Istio is with true open governance, under the auspices of a reputable organization with a level playing field for all contributors, transparency for users, and vendor-neutral management of the license and trademarks.
Based on this comment it sounds like IBM is saying that Google's OUC is not a vendor-neutral manager of license and trademark. It's also suggesting that there won't be a level playing field or transparency.
Basically IBM just wants it managed by an independent un-biased entity. Which sounds fair, if the whole purpose of the thing is not profit for one org, but the profit of a community.
More evidence to my argument that it is impossible for a corporation to own and develop a true community-led solution. The corporation is a slave to its shareholders and profit margins, so the community's wishes will never take priority.
> The problem with CNCF and why istio was not transferred to that org is that CNCF acts as a mediator, so any decision around trademark takes soo much time and effort because CNCF has to get the blessing of everyone or build something neutral (like the k8s certification), and it's in their best interest that things are complicated as they can make money out of that.
This is a cynical point of view. At this point, Istio takes advantage of a number of IBM, Oracle, Lyft and Red Hat developers while not giving them any governance over it..?
Valid point, and that's the balance i think OUC is trying to bring, not being as un-flexible as CNCF and trying to be as open to the community as possible. Again OUC is about the trademark and not the licensing of the software which is what contributors and maintainers should care about in my opinion.
As i commented above i don't have any evidence supported by data, just an opinion, i don't understand why kubecon cost 1k$+ while as a speaker you have to pay your flight...
I know non-profit in the US has to fill public tax returns, i will be interested in figuring out how much execs earn at CNCF!
Not affiliated with Google or CNCF but I've noticed too that it is ran as a business and so are their meetups all over the world. They also have a gigantic staff for what they do and it's obvious at this point that they must be paying themselves very well. It is also very disappointing that their events are so expensive indeed for a non-profit given that they have such a huge amount of sponsors https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-no...
I run a conference myself and we manage to be 3 times cheaper with only 8 sponsors and we take care of travel and lodging for speakers. With the amount of sponsors they get, they could get away with $10 tickets like PyCon Europe which is free for all and still take care of travel and lodging for speakers. When Google gave Kubernetes for free to CNCF non profit, I don't think this is what they had in mind and may be why they went with OUC instead.
"With the amount of sponsors they get, they could get away with $10 tickets like PyCon Europe which is free for all and still take care of travel and lodging for speakers. When Google gave Kubernetes for free to CNCF non profit, I don't think this is what they had in mind and may be why they went with OUC instead."
It's very expensive to run 10,000 person events, we run the events as pretty much break even across different projects, some events make money, some loss money, it all balances out. We also produce transparency reports for our events: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2020/01/09/kubecon-cloudnativecon-n...
Also keep in mind that nothing is free, running VENDOR NEUTRAL events is a hard business, ORM laid off all its events team recently during the pandemic (https://www.businessinsider.com/oreilly-media-layoffs-events...), I'm proud to say we haven't laid anyone off.
"As one of the founders of the project, Google is the current owner of the Istio trademark. While anyone who is using the software in accordance with the license can use the trademarks, the historic ownership has caused some confusion and uncertainty about who can use the name and how, and at times this confusion has been a barrier to community growth. So today, as part of Istio’s continued commitment to openness, Google is announcing that the Istio trademarks will be transferred to a new organization, the Open Usage Commons, to provide neutral, independent oversight of the marks. [...]"
It seems a bit that the big players also realize that making money off their technology investments would be nice.
Here we have the interest of IBM/Redhat that as a services company benefits from an as open as possible model, whereas Google as a product company notices that their hugely successful k8s play does not turn into business for their cloud product as intended.
My understanding is that there is a faction in Google that believes that making Kubernetes freely available as it did was a massive strategic mistake on the part of Google[1], tantamount to giving away the crown jewels. With this in mind, my impression is that there is a strong suspicion that Google is trying to find a way to continue to control the direction and ability to monetize Istio (and future projects if this works out) which obviously makes IBM irate since it now throws into doubt a slew of potential business opportunities on their end.
There is (or was, while I was there) a feeling coming from Tech. Infra. leadership that the company must avoid "industry-enabling" software projects and conference papers. There also is/was a faction that desired to avoid "getting Hadooped", referring to the map/reduce knockoff. Hadoop has a large mindshare outside Google but it is also incredibly bad and about 20 years behind Google internal practices. It both enables and disables the industry at the same time. So they didn't want that to happen with Borg.
That's interesting because there's also a vocal contingent who believes Google giving away Kubernetes was a punji trap that the rest of the tech world has falling into.
Is k8s an amazing force multiplier or an unmanageable white elephant? Can it be both?
K8s is a perfect weapon to drag internal IT Ops into the cloud: once good ops has been commoditized, then the economies of scale kick in and any non-enormous IT systems operator will eventually realize they can be a pure-play no-fixed-costs service provider. The only challenge is of course that good ops is not the same thing depending on scale, so hype is essential to bring the plebs into accepting maximal complexity of highest-scale ops.
With Java and .NET, or now serverless middleware, I never felt the need for something like k8s, as there were already solutions to deploy a bunch of EAR/WAR/DLLs into some cloud based server, including having cloud based DB servers like Amazon RDS.
Taken to an extreme, I don't care where and how those packages are executing, k8, jails, containers, bare metal,...
I'm not sure I completely agree... or at least disagree to the extent that docker/containerization of applications is a huge boost to being able to deploy consistent applications.
The harder part is when there are byzantine libraries that tether deep into the OS. Often this is the case for some .Net on windows (and even with Java), mostly around commercial licensing models.
Spent the past two years pushing for getting (most) of the applications being worked on to at least be able to containerize and two major application developments are now targeting kubernetes for deployment. It's been uphill to say the least.
I guess that in my case it helps that Java applications have been mostly application container based and the .NET libraries for such deployments are managed by IT's NuGET server with validated libraries.
The only ones that I have had such issues with OS integration were anyway in desktop context, which were deployed via VM snapshots, for access via RDS.
My biggest practical issues are around a few libraries with really restrictive licensing without good floss alternatives. At least short of the effort to hire and create appropriate ML models in house, which isn't a proficiency we currently have.
The API and the packaging standard is the main contract between users. Once everyone has agreed to the fact that they need to package their applications into containers, the orchestration can be done in any way. Google's Cloud Run uses Kubernetes API + Container packaging but doesn't actually run on GKE, it's running on their regular old compute engine and users don't even come to know.
It's a bit of both. In the end, I appreciate it and have been an advocate for the use of k8s. The harder part is actually hiring or developing in-house skills to manage the cluster(s). Not every company can afford a 6-7 figure consulting contract for a couple small clusters.
I never understood why a small company wants a completely in-house developed platform. Wouldn't it be more economical to directly use Cloud offerings? Or in case you need on-prem wouldn't it be wiser to just pay for offerings like OpenStack, CloudFoundry, DataDog, New Relic, GKE-on-prem and the likes?
For k8s, we have been leveraging some cloud solutions. Working with govt agencies, it's been a difficult push. At least with k8s, we can do internal, cloud and hybrid models depending on application and client needs.
Moving away from bespoke applications deployments has helped a lot.
Not a google dev but I looked closely at K8s in the early days .. in my personal opinion, I think it is complete fiction that K8s was Google opensourcing their actual code (in the traditional way). I think they rewrote the bulk of the initial code drop.
So agreed that K8s is not Google's crown jewels by any stretch. They were inspired by the Borg paper I'm guessing though the early scheduler in K8s was laughable IIRC.
This is confirmed by K8s/Borg devs on blogs and Twitter. k8s shares not one line of code with Borg. One easy way to tell is every line of Borg is in C++ and every line of k8s is Go.
This thread is a pretty good explanation of how k8s is derived from the need to be compatible with some Borg concepts, while not deriving from Borg itself.
It looks like the Open Usage Commons organization handles trademarking, so roughly speaking (I'm not a lawyer) they set and enforce rules under which other entities may use their hosted project names and brand identities.
When GCP's container engine launched[1] in 2014 it was initially referred to by the anagram 'GKE' yet corresponded to the name 'Google Container Engine'.
After achieving CNCF certification in Nov 2017[2], GCP began using the term 'Kubernetes' within the product name, rebranding it as 'Google Kubernetes Engine'.
At least as far back as Oct 2017, members of the CNCF did not have to pay any fees[3] to participate in the conformance program.
Is it possible that executives within Google were unhappy about the marketshare gains of GKE and attribute this partially to the time it took their product to achieve certification?
If so, could that have led them to push other open source initiatives within the company to retain their trademarks under tighter control, even if that required creating an organization with less experience handling international trademark registration?
As per the post, IBM's stated standpoint is: "IBM continues to believe that the best way to manage key open source projects such as Istio is with true open governance, under the auspices of a reputable organization with a level playing field for all contributors, transparency for users, and vendor-neutral management of the license and trademarks."
> After achieving CNCF certification in Nov 2017[2], GCP began using the term 'Kubernetes' within the product name, rebranding it as 'Google Kubernetes Engine'.
(At the time of GKE's launch, 'containers' were more well known than 'Kubernetes'. Google also owned the trademark, so it could have been called Kubernets Engine from the beginning.)
Do I understand correctly that this is a way to make sure the trademarks for the projects can be used in similar open fashion as the code itself?
My understanding: Typically the trademarks are not covered by the open source license. If the software is licensed under Apache license, I can use the software to power my cloud business, but I might not be entitled to use the project's trademark in my marketing.
This is entirely about the use of the trademarks/names.
If enough people are upset about it, they can fork the project and take it in their own direction under their own governance.
To me, this is a non-issue. The people doing the work on the project are setting the projects goals and rules, and if you want to do work on the project, nothing stops you, either under their governance/name, or your own.
As someone who helps run CNCF, there's about 100 certified distributions and thousands of people who have been certified as kubernetes administrators (CKAs), as a small non profit with about 25 employees that pales in comparison to a trillion dollar cloud provider
IBM collaborated with Google on Istio. Google just handed the control over the Istio trademark to its Open Usage Commons group without notifying the Istio community. IBM is understandably unhappy with that.
Based on the blog post its even worse. IBM and Google agreed to hand over the Istio trademark and project to the CNCF when Istio reached a certain maturity. Now it seems that Google unilaterally decided to not honor the agreement and keep the project and trademark by handing it over to their own organisation.
There appears to be no record of such an "agreement" other than IBM's claim. If there was, IBM would probably be doing more than writing snippy blog posts.
Well, according the CNCF statement mentioned by techcrunch [1], Istio has been submitted in the past when it was very very young [2] - that at least shows intent?
It doesn’t seem like this is a huge deal then, unless there’s something happening away from the public view... IBM would have just preferred that another organization had been used.
In my (worthless) opinion, I'm 90% sure that Google wants to drive istio in the direction of supporting AnthOS and that's why they're vying for control of the project. It seems increasingly clear to me that their entire cloud strategy seems to be to use AnthOS to try and perform an end-run around AWS
At the project’s inception, there was an agreement that the project would be contributed to the CNCF when it was mature.
If this is true, the authors could be sued for breach of contract (what the damages would be, I'm not sure). However, I suspect that this agreement was verbal or implicit and wasn't actually written anywhere.
As they say, a verbal agreement is worth the paper it's printed on.
For the uninformed, IBM is mostly in the business of selling expensive old-school consultancy solutions by marketing snake oil and packaging open source in proprietary label. Need evidence? Watch this cringeworthy video, for example: https://youtu.be/iNVM8vGCZjQ
IBM contributes to the Linux Foundation (Node.js, webpack, jquery, etc.), Apache, and by owning RedHat, also major parts of Linux development, among other things.
IBM is essentially a consortium of at least 35 different companies masquerading as one. A lot of those companies are doing ridiculous nonsense, but some of them are doing really cutting edge work. IBM Research in particular attracts some top-notch talent.
The other two projects under that are Angular and Gerrit, two other Google products.
IBM's disappointment stems from the fact that they feel Istio is also their baby and that it was suppose to goto the CNCF one day, not Googles own umbrella foundation.
I think the same. Google for the most part want their names associated with these products rather than being something community driven.