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

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

#101

Post by cromwellian » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 11:29 PM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #73

ehsankia wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

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 t…

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.

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

#102

Post by ocdtrekkie » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 4:28 AM UTC

cromwellian wrote: post #101

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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…

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.

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

#103

Post by ksec » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 5:19 AM UTC

sg1234 wrote: post #100

ksec wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Apache is sort of like BSD+Patents, are there any licenses that are BSD + Patents + Trademarks?

Not to my knowledge, most OSS licenses leave out the trademark issue, happy to be proven wrong.

This is strange, doesn't that leave a big gap to be filled?

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

#104

Post by koffiezet » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 5:59 PM UTC

sg1234 wrote: post #95

koffiezet wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sudd…

> 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…

> 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/

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

#105

Post by koffiezet » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 6:03 PM UTC

freedomben wrote: post #81

koffiezet wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (Hello Red Hat lol) 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 t…

I'm not talking about consultancy fees. I'm only talking about Redhat licenses for OpenShift and its support contracts.

I'm also a freelance consultant mainly focused on OpenShift and k8s, my bill is separate.

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

#106

Post by koffiezet » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 6:05 PM UTC

znpy wrote: post #71

koffiezet wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (Hello Red Hat lol) 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.

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...

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

#107

Post by freedomben » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 6:19 PM UTC

koffiezet wrote: post #105

freedomben wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I'm not talking about consultancy fees. I'm only talking about Redhat licenses for OpenShift and its support contracts. I'm also a freelance consultant mainly focused on OpenShift and k8s, my bill is separate.

Ah ok, I gotcha. No disagreement here. Apologies for misconstruing your comment.

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

#108

Post by tracker1 » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 5:48 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #35

tracker1 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gettin…

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.

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

#109

Post by tracker1 » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 5:51 PM UTC

harpratap wrote: post #43

tracker1 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#110

Post by patrickaljord » Sun, Jul 12, 2020, 12:42 PM UTC

sg1234 wrote: post #99

mikeyouse wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.