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How many of the core developers don’t work for Cisco? Projects tend to go where the core team wants.

I would guess the majority of the core team works for Isovalent but Cilium is a mature product by now, used by tens of huge companies (e.g. Google's GKE, AWS, Alibaba).

Cisco can screw (and likely will) the commercial Enterprise offering, not really the Cilium project

Two things to think about: say they make a big product direction change you don’t want – how many people are going to contribute to a community fork? Or say random, senseless acts of MBA happen and nobody is employed to work on it any more.

Those big companies are inconsistent so you can’t count on that, especially if the change doesn’t affect them or they’re already maintaining an internal fork. It’s not mission critical for them so I would not be shocked if they decided that some other approach was best for their businesses and their engineers spend time migrating instead of taking over maintainership.

I’m not saying that will or even is likely to happen but I would think about how hard it would be for you if it did because the odds of Cisco screwing up a popular project are a lot greater than zero.

They would have had to add a few externals to get to Graduated but it's definitely a minority:

https://github.com/cilium/cilium/blob/main/MAINTAINERS.md

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