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

developer.ibm.com

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

#41

Post by johannes1234321 »

deanCommie wrote: post #15
tedk-42 wrote: post #13

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…

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.

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

#42

Post by harpratap »

pjmlp wrote: post #38
akoncius wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

without attention there will be no sales

Well it doesn't seem to be working then.

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"

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

#43

Post by harpratap »

tracker1 wrote: post #31
ForHackernews wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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?

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

#44

Post by harpratap »

pjmlp wrote: post #29
polotics wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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,...

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.

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

#45

Post by pjmlp »

harpratap wrote: post #42
pjmlp wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it doesn't seem to be working then.

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"

By the market position of Amazon and Microsoft versus what Google keeps trying to do, and there are enough candidates for that 3rd place.

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

#46

Post by harpratap »

pjmlp wrote: post #45
harpratap wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

By the market position of Amazon and Microsoft versus what Google keeps trying to do, and there are enough candidates for that 3rd place.

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.

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

#47

Post by holstvoogd »

sg1234 wrote: post #24

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 mo…

K8s was transferred to CNCF a.o. Why is this different? Or is this a reaction to issues with those transfers?

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

#48

Post by dmantis »

deanCommie wrote: post #15
tedk-42 wrote: post #13

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…

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…

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.

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

#49

Post by lmz »

dmantis wrote: post #48
deanCommie wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

None of those cases have anything to do with trademarks. Infrastructure/economic control maybe, but not trademarks.

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

#50

Post by pjmlp »

harpratap wrote: post #46
pjmlp wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the market position of Amazon and Microsoft versus what Google keeps trying to do, and there are enough candidates for that 3rd place.

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.

Hope is good I guess, maybe by then Google has managed to finally provide enterprise level confidence on their offerings.
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