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Comment by gouggoug | Hacker News Reader

> This is why it was open sourced, as a balance between control leverage and adoption.

I feel like I read this kind of statement all the time and I don't understand the reasoning behind it.

Google came up with k8s. They could have kept it for themselves, or, open source it. They open-sourced it. It definitely benefits them, but, it also benefits us a lot.

Saying they "open sourced, as a balance between control leverage and adoption" is so cynical. So I'd like to ask, what's the alternative? Not open-sourcing? Who would that benefit?

What would be the non-ill-intentioned alternative that Google supposedly could have chosen?

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Why did Google create Kubernetes and open source it? Why did the people who created Kubernetes all leave Google? What was the business strategy behind it all?

After all, the created omega but it never did replace borg. Kubernetes wasn't meant to replace borg, was it?

Google didn't create and release Kubernetes out of the goodness of their hearts. Have you ever pondered the strategy behind it all? Maybe they couldn't have kept it to themselves because that would have defeated the underlying purpose in the first place?

> Why did the people who created Kubernetes all leave Google?

Umm, we didn't?

> created omega but it never did replace borg

It did have material impact on Borg.

Sometimes the strategy is simply "we know how to do this, and we'd prefer not to see you go through all the same pain to figure it out".

Tim, I should not have used "all" there.

Timmy!! When will knative and istio be handed over to a foundation? Does LF/CNCF have enough carrots in Jim Zemlin's bag of tricks??

'tis fascinating to dig in to open source serverless on Kubernetes options only to realize that there's probably 100+ engineers working on istio+knative, ~10x more than any prior alternative.

When is KnativeCon coming?

I don't think he's involved very closely.

Since folks get so worked up about allocations unofficially shaping decisions, I suggest[^] that Knative be homed with the Cloud Foundry Foundation, where the rules are written to give votes based on how many fulltime contributors you assign. That way it's all out in the open.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, which is in both the CFF and CNCF. I was aware of Knative relatively early.

[^] in a ha-ha-only-serious way

> Why did the people who created Kubernetes all leave Google?

Brendan Burns went to Microsoft to work on Kubernetes on Azure. He'd been working at Google for 8 years already. Microsoft probably paid a lot to acquire him and it wouldn't be surprising if he saw it as an exciting opportunity to keep working on his creation while leading an exciting new project.

Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie left together to found a company whose product _is_ Kubernetes (Heptio).

So I could guess they just realized that their resume opened them to exciting new opportunities.

> Have you ever pondered the strategy behind it all?

Yes, and I can't see what it could be, so I'd love to be enlightened.

So far all I see is that I'm using an amazing software that has considerably simplified my life when dealing with my infrastructure. I so happen to be using GKE (and maybe _that_ was the grand evil plan all along!), but I know that I could use AWS or Azure or even go back to bare metal if I wanted to.

Aaand they sold that company to IBM for a huge amount, so it was likely a smart move.

VMWare

Thanks. Got all those acquisitions that happened around the same time mixed up.

To be fair, two of the cofounders went to different companies to focus on k8s. So while they left Google, it clearly wasn't because they wanted to get away from kubernetes. Rather they're got a great opportunity and took it.

> Why did Google create Kubernetes and open source it?

I think it's misleading to conflate questions whether Google's k8s engineers can use shortcuts through the organizational fabric around k8s with the project's source licensing.

k8s being open source merely means that the code is open and for everybody to use under clear and rather generous (even if potentially reciprocal) terms that are OSD compatible.

In particular "open source" doesn't mean that everybody gets to have a say on anything or everything: those with commit rights always reign supreme.

As for the part about procedural rules and their (ab)use like the ability to take shortcuts because everybody outside the cabal happens to be absent for whatever reason: that could have happened just as well in any body under pay-to-play rules that covers "software standards" (or anything, really), eg. OSF, X/OPEN, UEFI Forum, ... You don't don't get to hear about the drama.

In theory I guess Google could have open sourced k8s and then walked away, refusing to contribute anything more. According to "community is everything" thinkers this would have led to even greater/faster adoption than k8s already has (if such a thing is possible). Of course it sounds ridiculous when you state it explicitly which I guess is why they never do.

A for profit company doing something with balanced objectives, how is hat ill intentioned?

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