
Upbound Cloud Community Preview - philips
https://blog.upbound.io/announcing-upbound-cloud-community-preview/
======
prasek
excited to see Crossplane being donated to the CNCF as well:
[https://blog.upbound.io/upbound-and-leaders-from-the-
cloud-n...](https://blog.upbound.io/upbound-and-leaders-from-the-cloud-native-
community-advance-a-new-approach-to-application-and-infrastructure-management-
with-crossplane/)

~~~
kollateral
Upbound seems to still steering the project for the coming years. In fact, I
can even say that it's not really open source so long its direction is set by
a commercial entity. It's just that the code is open.

I know that it's important that Upbound makes some money so that it can keep
maintaining Crossplane (see poor Docker) but it's just we should be careful
about what we call things so that the words don't get meaningless..

~~~
zapita
Crossplane is open-source. You're moving the goal posts on what is "real open-
source" in a way that is not reasonable.

Do you also consider Gitlab or Red Hat products to be "not real open-source"?
Because they are also controlled by a single commercial entity, yet nobody
seems to question their open-source credentials.

> _I know that it 's important that Upbound makes some money so that it can
> keep maintaining Crossplane (see poor Docker) but ..._

This is exactly why it's hard for companies like Docker to make money. Giving
away a free product is not enough. Open-sourcing all of it is not enough. No,
you have to create a bullshit "neutral" governance that ensures small
companies like Upbound and Docker are kept in check by Google, Microsoft, IBM,
and other giant corporations that can afford to pack committees, hire more
contributors, and spend more marketing dollars to associate themselves with
the brand.

Those foundations are not about making the projects more open at all. They
have become a form of "protection money". Give your project away to a big
foundation, indirectly controlled by large corporate sponsors who happen to be
your competitors - or see your project sabotaged by people like you calling it
"not really open", "evil" and "controlled by the VCs".

~~~
kollateral
What I'm saying here is that if one commercial entity controls a project, then
it can't ensure that others can trust that one day the feature their product
depends on will be gone or changed.

> Do you also consider Gitlab or Red Hat products to be "not real open-
> source"?

Would you trust Gitlab so much that you'd build your own business on top of
its open code and compete with Gitlab? I'd use Gitlab in my company but I
wouldn't build on top of its code and hope that the future releases won't
break my product.

> This is exactly why it's hard for companies like Docker to make money.

I agree with you on how hard it is for these companies to make money but then
don't make money this way, what can I say? I'm just saying that what we call
open-source needs to be neutral and that doesn't necessarily mean Google,
Microsoft etc. will crush the company. Not a single open source project is
crushed by those if they didn't allow it. It's all about competition and
they're making a choice. Some say if you can't compete then collaborate (hand
off some parts), some just keep working without them; maybe fail and no one
hears about them even if it was a great idea or it was too good for those
companies to be destroyed.

~~~
zapita
> _Would you trust Gitlab so much that you 'd build your own business on top
> of its open code and compete with Gitlab? I'd use Gitlab in my company but I
> wouldn't build on top of its code and hope that the future releases won't
> break my product._

That's a legitimate concern. But it has nothing to do with whether or not they
are "real" open-source.

