I was under the impression that Istio and Envoy are significantly driven by Tetrate (https://www.tetrate.io/), which in my understanding was started by the Istio creators and sells enterprise editions of the two solutions [1]. So yeah it's open source, I can fork it and that's nice, but let's be honest Tetrate aims to monetize these products. Not saying this can't work and be great for the community at the same time, but I'm at least a bit skeptical.

1: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210310005295/en/Tet...