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

#111

Post by jart » Sun, Jul 12, 2020, 1:49 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…

I disagree. Let's assume you're correct though. Open source altruism is a fantastic opportunity for greed. Especially when it comes to big companies. Doing good deeds for community projects drives the good will engine for your core business.

Let's say you're the maintainer of the `ls` command. Some Facebook employee comes along and fixes a bug, out of the goodness of his heart. You're going to think, wow, Facebook is helping me, now I trust Facebook more.

Problem is incentives. If Facebook gets large enough, its employees who are trying to stake a claim in open source might not be thinking about how that ties into the company as a whole, if leadership isn't rewarding it.

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

#112

Post by manigandham » Sun, Jul 12, 2020, 11:24 PM UTC

Andrex wrote: post #63

fcantournet wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ge…

> 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.

That's exactly how it is in adtech where Google dictates everything to the rest of the industry.

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

#113

Post by cromwellian » Mon, Jul 13, 2020, 9:59 AM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #102

cromwellian wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You attribute too much to management, as if everything not expressly forbidden is omitted for a reason.

Corporations do not have 100% visibility into what their employees are doing in totality and they often don't write any rules for or against something until after an employee does something so bad it creates negative PR.

There's no employee handbook rule that tells me I can comment on HackerNews, or tells me that I can't (well, I hope not). So until I get a call from Google HR telling me I did something bad on HN, I do it.

I don't think this is Google specific, I don't think the vast majority of employees in the tech sector obtain permission for both after hours contributions they make on the internet, or even stuff they do while at work, even though most companies have a policy not to use work computers for personal things.

People just don't compartmentalize their lives like that. Like say you're at the office, you're browsing some GitHub repo on a project completely unrelated to your company, and you notice an easy to fix bug, and send in a PR on your work desktop while at the office. Is your company allowing you to do this explicitly, or do they just not care, as long as you're being responsible and not spending all day at the office working on non-work stuff and not deliverables.

The COVID era brings this even more into focus, with everyone working from home now, really, how many people are doing other work during office hours?

You're trying too hard to attribute master planning to management, when the truth is, most of these tech companies are more chaotic and autonomous internally then most people realize.

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

#114

Post by caniszczyk » Mon, Jul 13, 2020, 7:31 PM UTC

patrickaljord wrote: post #110

sg1234 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.linuxfo…

"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."

It's very expensive to run 10,000 person events, we run the events as pretty much break even across different projects, some events make money, some loss money, it all balances out. We also produce transparency reports for our events: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2020/01/09/kubecon-cloudnativecon-n...

Also keep in mind that nothing is free, running VENDOR NEUTRAL events is a hard business, ORM laid off all its events team recently during the pandemic (https://www.businessinsider.com/oreilly-media-layoffs-events...), I'm proud to say we haven't laid anyone off.