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Comment by Google234 | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain why this matters? I still don’t get it after reading the blog post or fh973’s comment.

As far as I understand:

IBM collaborated with Google on Istio. Google just handed the control over the Istio trademark to its Open Usage Commons group without notifying the Istio community. IBM is understandably unhappy with that.

Based on the blog post its even worse. IBM and Google agreed to hand over the Istio trademark and project to the CNCF when Istio reached a certain maturity. Now it seems that Google unilaterally decided to not honor the agreement and keep the project and trademark by handing it over to their own organisation.

disclaimer: work for IBM, but not on istio.

There appears to be no record of such an "agreement" other than IBM's claim. If there was, IBM would probably be doing more than writing snippy blog posts.

Well, according the CNCF statement mentioned by techcrunch [1], Istio has been submitted in the past when it was very very young [2] - that at least shows intent?

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/08/google-launches-the-open-u...

[2] https://github.com/cncf/toc/pull/70

"Google launches the Open Usage Commons, a new organization for managing open-source trademarks"

https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/08/google-launches-the-open-u...

And their FAQ: https://openusage.org/faq/#what-is-the-open-usage-commons

> "Google launches the Open Usage Commons, a new organization for managing open-source trademarks"

We know that. The confusing part is figuring out what does "managing open-source trademarks" have to do with other companies and developers...

It doesn’t seem like this is a huge deal then, unless there’s something happening away from the public view... IBM would have just preferred that another organization had been used.

CNCF is where most people and companies doing anything with Kubernetes (who don't work at Google) would expect Istio to reside.

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