Hi, Richard. You're correct that CNCF requires projects to provide the trademark, but we don't need copyright, because the ASLv2 license the code is already under is sufficient. "Contribute" might be better word than "donate".

But it all a very open-source-oriented, metaphysical concept, in that by giving up some control over a project, the company that originated it is hopefully going to bring in many more contributors and ultimately increase both the total value of the project and the value to them. A core CNCF value proposition to projects [0] is that: "A neutral home for your project increases the willingness of developers from other companies and independent developers to collaborate, contribute, and become committers."

Solomon made a useful analogy [1] that "rough comparison: Docker EE=RHEL, CE=Fedora, containerd=Linux".

[0] https://www.cncf.io/projects/ [1] https://twitter.com/solomonstre/status/837313258252091393

Disclosure: I'm the executive director of CNCF and have been working with Docker on their contribution of containerd and with CoreOS on their contribution of rkt.