
Why IBM doesn’t agree with Google’s Open Usage Commons for the Istio project - bharatsb
https://developer.ibm.com/components/istio/blogs/istio-google-open-usage-commons/
======
tedk-42
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
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.

~~~
maffydub
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).

~~~
fcantournet
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 ?)

~~~
Andrex
> better at abusing their current dominant position (hehe it sucks doesn't
> Goog ? heh? Doesn't it ?)

Just wanted to say this one weirdly petty/obnoxious concluding line tainted an
otherwise solid comment. Seems unnecessary.

~~~
solarkraft
I don't see why. It's funny, based on facts and doesn't imply a clear bias
(very different from something like "and btw Google are assholes").

------
sg1234
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

~~~
koffiezet
> 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.

~~~
sg1234
> 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$+

~~~
koffiezet
> 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.

[1] [https://www.cncf.io/people/staff/](https://www.cncf.io/people/staff/)

------
jpalomaki
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. [...]"

------
fh973
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
Could you please elaborate on what this has to do with this dispute about how
to open source the trademark?

~~~
Zafira
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/12798801693443358...](https://twitter.com/ThatMightBePaul/status/1279880169344335874)

~~~
ForHackernews
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
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
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
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
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.

~~~
tracker1
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.

------
jka
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-
en...](https://www.infoq.com/news/2014/11/google-cloud-container-engine/)

[2] - [https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/introducing-
certi...](https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/introducing-certified-
kubernetes-and-google-kubernetes-engine)

[3] -
[https://github.com/cncf/k8s-conformance/commit/34683a3316473...](https://github.com/cncf/k8s-conformance/commit/34683a331647377585f30df47a1bce27b731cac9#diff-1131adf39164dafb81de955efadf6029R39)

~~~
crb
> 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-
cert...](https://kubernetes.io/blog/2017/10/software-conformance-
certification/)

(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-
kubernete...](https://www.manning.com/books/getting-started-with-kubernetes)

~~~
jka
Thanks for the explanation; that all makes sense and certainly makes the
naming of GKE seem like less of a driving factor.

PS: For anyone curious about the adoption of the word 'Kubernetes', Google
Trends provides a good summary:
[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=kubernet...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=kubernetes)
(2014 was definitely very early days)

------
jpalomaki
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.

------
londons_explore
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
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
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

------
Google234
Can someone explain why this matters? I still don’t get it after reading the
blog post or fh973’s comment.

~~~
gtirloni
"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...](https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/08/google-launches-the-open-usage-
commons-a-new-organization-for-managing-open-source-trademarks/)

And their FAQ: [https://openusage.org/faq/#what-is-the-open-usage-
commons](https://openusage.org/faq/#what-is-the-open-usage-commons)

~~~
Google234
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
CNCF is where most people and companies doing anything with Kubernetes (who
don't work at Google) would expect Istio to reside.

------
revel
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

------
otterley
_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.

------
mehrdada
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
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__
Also recently the OpenPOWER foundation got moved under the Linux Foundation

