[cmcluck]

disclaimer: i am a founder of the Kubernetes project and did the article with Cade at Wired. i also was product lead for compute engine back in the day fwiw :).

I am not sure which projects you have looked at from Google in terms of Open Source, but in the case of Kubernetes we have worked pretty hard to engage a community outside of Google and work with the community to make sure that Kubernetes is solid. One of the things that I like about the it is that many of the top contributors don't work at Google. People like Red Hat have worked very closely with us to make sure that (1) Kubernetes works well on traditional infrastructure (2) that it is a comprehensive system that meets enterprise needs, (3) that the usability is solid. People like Mirantis are working to integrate Kubernetes into the OpenStack ecosystem. The project started as a Google thing, but is bigger than a single company now.

Another thing worth noting: building a hosted commercial product (Google Container Engine) in the open by relying exclusively on the Kubernetes code base has helped us ensure that what we have built is explicitly not locked into Google's infrastructure, that the experience is good (since our community has built much of the experience), and that the product solves a genuinely broad set of problems.

Also consider that many of our early production users don't run on Google. Many do, but many also run on AWS or on private clouds.

-- craig

[jacques_chester]

I'd be interested to see whether Google follow's Pivotal's lead and donates its IP to an independent foundation, as happened with Cloud Foundry.

Disclaimer: I work for Pivotal, in Pivotal Labs.