When the Istio service mesh was first proposed to be included in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in November 2017, it was still v.02, had only been around less than six months, and yet it aimed to skip the entry-level most young projects enter at and instead applied for inclusion at the secondary incubation tier. While the project was founded primarily by Google and IBM, and boasted numerous other contributors such as Yahoo, Apprenda, Concur, and AT&T, it was met with skepticism — it was so new, it didn’t really have adoption to speak of quite yet, and there were some technical concerns. Just a month after the proposal was made, the pull request was closed, without comment.
“There was a lot of push from a lot of providers in the community that Istio was going to go to the CNCF and in the beginning, it was a little bit complex because it just wasn’t ready to be honest,” said Solo.io CEO Idit Levine, explaining that Google didn’t want to commit the project before it had a strong foundation. “If the foundation is not really good, you put it out there and people will build stuff on it, and it’s like a building, it will collapse eventually.”
Ever since then there has been an expectation among many that it would be — once ready — handed over to the CNCF to join the rest of its cloud native siblings. Earlier this month, Google effectively put an end to those expectations with the launch of the Open Usage Commons (OUC), with Istio among three founding projects. When we first spoke with Chris DiBona, director of open source for Google and Alphabet, about the launch, he said that this was indeed the aforementioned foundation that Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian had spoken of earlier this year when he said Istio would be going to a foundation. We caught up with DiBona again a couple of days later, however, and he was adamant that “foundation” or not, the OUC was in the business of trademarks and trademarks only.
“The point of the Open Usage Commons is to attack the issues around having trademarks in open source projects and making sure that they’re being shared appropriately and consistently with the Open Source Definition,” said DiBona in a recent New Stack Context podcast. “We are not in the foundation business. We’re not in the marketing business. We’re not in the conference business. We’re not the governance or steering committees of any of these projects. We are strictly there to administer trademarks. The goal is not to be the Linux Foundation, or Apache Software Foundation or Software Freedom Conservancy.”
“The result of what’s going on right now with Istio with what Google did, versus giving it to the foundation, is equivalent. As to the end user, and I’m an end user, I don’t really care, right. It’s the same thing.” — Solo.io CEO Idit Levine
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