I'd recommend seeing the comments from jamesgpearce (of Facebook) and amateurhuman (of GitHub) on this previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8321995. Also, this Wired piece does a really good job of capturing the origins of the group and what it's trying to do: http://www.wired.com/2014/09/medieval-style-guilds-will-rema....

Folks are right that the goals are somewhat vague, and some of that is intentional... we're still working it out. But we realize that we all work at companies that have formal open source programs that are solving a lot of the same problems, but we aren't collaborating with each other to the extent that we could. Particularly when it comes to how we run those programs and deal with the challenges that are unique to medium to large companies using and releasing open source. This group is an attempt to start having those discussions.

The goal here seems very vague and not well defined. And the fact that all its members are high-profile companies worries me that their involvement will merely been a facade for publicity more than anything truly constructive.

I hope this group can figure out a master contributor license agreement. Getting together N bilateral CLAs is not ideal.

Publicity stunt? The expression "Empty barrelse, make the most noise" comes to mind.

Let's say I worked for Microsoft. Why should we join this, as opposed, to say, putting that energy towards actual open source projects? Assume non-infinite resources.