In May 2017, IBM and Google jointly announced the launch of Istio, a merger of Google’s Istio and IBM’s Amalgam8 projects. As a founding member of the Istio project, IBM is strongly invested in the engineering, leadership, and success of the Istio project.

Today’s announcement by Google of the creation of the Open Usage Commons (OUC) is disappointing because it doesn’t live up to the community’s expectation for open governance. An open governance process is the underpinning of many successful projects. Without this vendor-neutral approach to project governance, there will be friction within the community of Kubernetes-related projects.

At the project’s inception, there was an agreement that the project would be contributed to the CNCF when it was mature. IBM continues to believe that the best way to manage key open source projects such as Istio is with true open governance, under the auspices of a reputable organization with a level playing field for all contributors, transparency for users, and vendor-neutral management of the license and trademarks. Google should reconsider their original commitment and bring Istio to the CNCF.

Istio resources

• IBM’s reflection on Istio’s third birthday, written May 2020
• Istio Explained