12 ms·

Why IBM doesn’t agree with Google’s Open Usage Commons for the Istio project

205 points by bharatsb 6y ago

fh973 6y ago
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.
- Google234 6y ago
  Could you please elaborate on what this has to do with this dispute about how to open source the trademark?
  - Zafira 6y ago
    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. [1] https://twitter.com/ThatMightBePaul/status/1279880169344335874 https://twitter.com/ThatMightBePaul/status/12798801693443358...
    - ForHackernews 6y ago
      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?
      - polotics 6y ago
        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.
        pjmlp 6y ago
        Depends pretty much on the stack. 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,...
        tracker1 6y ago
        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.
        pjmlp 6y ago
        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.
    - foobiekr 6y ago
      Geeze. If kubernetes is google’s Crown Jewels they must be in terrible shape internally.
      - brutus1213 6y ago
        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.
        jeffbee 6y ago
        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. https://twitter.com/bgrant0607/status/1131202013411176448 https://twitter.com/bgrant0607/status/1131202013411176448
    - jeffbee 6y ago
      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.
Google234 6y ago
Can someone explain why this matters? I still don’t get it after reading the blog post or fh973’s comment.
- gtirloni 6y ago
  "Google launches the Open Usage Commons, a new organization for managing open-source trademarks" https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/08/google-launches-the-open-usage-commons-a-new-organization-for-managing-open-source-trademarks/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/08/google-launches-the-open-u... And their FAQ: https://openusage.org/faq/#what-is-the-open-usage-commons https://openusage.org/faq/#what-is-the-open-usage-commons
  - Google234 6y ago
    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.
    - verst 6y ago
      CNCF is where most people and companies doing anything with Kubernetes (who don't work at Google) would expect Istio to reside.
  - BossingAround 6y ago
    > "Google launches the Open Usage Commons, a new organization for managing open-source trademarks" We know that. The confusing part is figuring out what does "managing open-source trademarks" have to do with other companies and developers...
- josefx 6y ago
  As far as I understand: 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.
mehrdada 6y ago
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 https://youtu.be/iNVM8vGCZjQ
- tannhaeuser 6y ago
  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.
  - erk__ 6y ago
    Also recently the OpenPOWER foundation got moved under the Linux Foundation
- tracker1 6y ago
  While that is mostly true... they also have massive contributions to open-source.
- framebit 6y ago
  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.
jpalomaki 6y ago
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.
jpalomaki 6y ago
Relevant post from Istio blog: https://istio.io/latest/blog/2020/open-usage/ https://istio.io/latest/blog/2020/open-usage/ "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. [...]"
tedk-42 6y ago
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.
- deanCommie 6y ago
  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.
  - ehsankia 6y ago
    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.
    - duxup 6y ago
      >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.
    - 6y ago
londons_explore 6y ago
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.
- Zafira 6y ago
  If you look at the CNCF, they now offer Kubernetes certifications. This is worth a lot of money. This is probably one part of what is driving this.
  - caniszczyk 6y ago
    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
sg1234 6y ago
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
- zekrioca 6y ago
  > and it's in their best interest that things are complicated as they can make money out of that. Care to supply some evidences for such claim?
  - mikeyouse 6y ago
    Right? How is CNCF 'making money' from K8s when it's a nonprofit that by law must spend 100% of the funds it raises on the project?
    - sg1234 6y ago
      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!
jka 6y ago
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." [1] - https://www.infoq.com/news/2014/11/google-cloud-container-engine/ https://www.infoq.com/news/2014/11/google-cloud-container-en... [2] - https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/introducing-certified-kubernetes-and-google-kubernetes-engine https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/introducing-certi... [3] - https://github.com/cncf/k8s-conformance/commit/34683a331647377585f30df47a1bce27b731cac9#diff-1131adf39164dafb81de955efadf6029R39 https://github.com/cncf/k8s-conformance/commit/34683a3316473...
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
  FWIW, the GKE acronym (also?) came about because GCE is GCP's core VM offering, Google Compute Engine.
- crb 6y ago
  > After achieving CNCF certification in Nov 2017[2], GCP began using the term 'Kubernetes' within the product name, rebranding it as 'Google Kubernetes Engine'. After _creating_ the certification program: it was driven by GKE PM (and upcoming book author[1]) William Denniss. https://kubernetes.io/blog/2017/10/software-conformance-certification/ https://kubernetes.io/blog/2017/10/software-conformance-cert... (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.) [1] https://www.manning.com/books/getting-started-with-kubernetes https://www.manning.com/books/getting-started-with-kubernete...
otterley 6y ago
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. Get your promises in writing, folks.
revel 6y ago
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

205 points by bharatsb 6y ago

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.

Google234 6y ago
Could you please elaborate on what this has to do with this dispute about how to open source the trademark?
- Zafira 6y ago
  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. [1] https://twitter.com/ThatMightBePaul/status/1279880169344335874 https://twitter.com/ThatMightBePaul/status/12798801693443358...
  - ForHackernews 6y ago
    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?
    - polotics 6y ago
      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.
      - pjmlp 6y ago
        Depends pretty much on the stack. 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,...
        tracker1 6y ago
        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.
        pjmlp 6y ago
        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.
  - foobiekr 6y ago
    Geeze. If kubernetes is google’s Crown Jewels they must be in terrible shape internally.
    - brutus1213 6y ago
      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.
      - jeffbee 6y ago
        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. https://twitter.com/bgrant0607/status/1131202013411176448 https://twitter.com/bgrant0607/status/1131202013411176448
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    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.

Google234 6y ago

Can someone explain why this matters? I still don’t get it after reading the blog post or fh973’s comment.

gtirloni 6y ago
"Google launches the Open Usage Commons, a new organization for managing open-source trademarks" https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/08/google-launches-the-open-usage-commons-a-new-organization-for-managing-open-source-trademarks/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/08/google-launches-the-open-u... And their FAQ: https://openusage.org/faq/#what-is-the-open-usage-commons https://openusage.org/faq/#what-is-the-open-usage-commons
- Google234 6y ago
  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.
  - verst 6y ago
    CNCF is where most people and companies doing anything with Kubernetes (who don't work at Google) would expect Istio to reside.
- BossingAround 6y ago
  > "Google launches the Open Usage Commons, a new organization for managing open-source trademarks" We know that. The confusing part is figuring out what does "managing open-source trademarks" have to do with other companies and developers...
josefx 6y ago
As far as I understand: 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.

mehrdada 6y ago

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 https://youtu.be/iNVM8vGCZjQ

tannhaeuser 6y ago
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.
- erk__ 6y ago
  Also recently the OpenPOWER foundation got moved under the Linux Foundation
tracker1 6y ago
While that is mostly true... they also have massive contributions to open-source.
framebit 6y ago
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.

jpalomaki 6y ago

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.

jpalomaki 6y ago

Relevant post from Istio blog: https://istio.io/latest/blog/2020/open-usage/ https://istio.io/latest/blog/2020/open-usage/ "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. [...]"

tedk-42 6y ago

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.

deanCommie 6y ago
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.
- ehsankia 6y ago
  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.
  - duxup 6y ago
    >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.
  - 6y ago

londons_explore 6y ago

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.

Zafira 6y ago
If you look at the CNCF, they now offer Kubernetes certifications. This is worth a lot of money. This is probably one part of what is driving this.
- caniszczyk 6y ago
  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

sg1234 6y ago

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

zekrioca 6y ago
> and it's in their best interest that things are complicated as they can make money out of that. Care to supply some evidences for such claim?
- mikeyouse 6y ago
  Right? How is CNCF 'making money' from K8s when it's a nonprofit that by law must spend 100% of the funds it raises on the project?
  - sg1234 6y ago
    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!

jka 6y ago

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." [1] - https://www.infoq.com/news/2014/11/google-cloud-container-engine/ https://www.infoq.com/news/2014/11/google-cloud-container-en... [2] - https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/introducing-certified-kubernetes-and-google-kubernetes-engine https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/introducing-certi... [3] - https://github.com/cncf/k8s-conformance/commit/34683a331647377585f30df47a1bce27b731cac9#diff-1131adf39164dafb81de955efadf6029R39 https://github.com/cncf/k8s-conformance/commit/34683a3316473...

9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
FWIW, the GKE acronym (also?) came about because GCE is GCP's core VM offering, Google Compute Engine.
crb 6y ago
> After achieving CNCF certification in Nov 2017[2], GCP began using the term 'Kubernetes' within the product name, rebranding it as 'Google Kubernetes Engine'. After _creating_ the certification program: it was driven by GKE PM (and upcoming book author[1]) William Denniss. https://kubernetes.io/blog/2017/10/software-conformance-certification/ https://kubernetes.io/blog/2017/10/software-conformance-cert... (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.) [1] https://www.manning.com/books/getting-started-with-kubernetes https://www.manning.com/books/getting-started-with-kubernete...

otterley 6y ago

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. Get your promises in writing, folks.

revel 6y ago

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