Google is set to give up most control over the Knative Project by electing a steering committee to oversee the direction of the Kubernetes-based serverless project. The decision comes on the heels of Google taking a more controversial approach with the Istio service mesh project.

Protocol first reported on Google’s plans for the Knative Project late last week.

In a blog post, Paul Morie, writing on behalf of the Knative Steering Committee, explained that it had recently constructed a new steering committee charter that will include an upcoming election for five steering committee members. The plan calls for the five members to serve as individuals and not representing their employer. The plan also states that no vendor will be allowed to have a majority of seats on the steering committee.

The project will also set up a new Knative Trademark Committee to deal with trademark issues. That committee will initially include members from Google, IBM/Red Hat, and VMware.

“During the discussions around new governance, it became apparent that there was a clear separation of concerns between the specific vendor needs around trademark, ‘core’ scope (for lack of a better term) and conformance, and the broader community needs around everything else [the steering committee] does,” Morie wrote. “While we could have created a hybrid structure for [the steering committee], we decided it was simpler to just have a vendor committee that focused only on scope and conformance, with the steering committee focusing on the other aspects of community growth and project governance.”

The trademark decision harkens back to Google’s decision this summer to move the Istio project into its newly developed Open Usage Commons (OUC) instead of into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Google explained the move was based on the need to protect the trademark of open source projects.

Chris DiBona, director for open source at Google, explained at that time that the use of project trademarks is different from the code “as trademarks are a method of quality assurance.”

“When trademarks are properly managed, project maintainers can define their identity, provide assurances to downstream users of the quality of their offering, and give others in the community certainty about the free and fair use of the brand,” DiBona noted. “Understanding and managing trademarks is critical for the long-term sustainability of projects, particularly with the increasing number of enterprise products based on open source. Trademarks sit at the juncture of the rule of law and the philosophy of open source, a complicated space; for this reason, we consider it to be the next challenge for open source, one we want to help with.”

However, many viewed the decision as a way for Google to maintain control over the project. Istio had been by many as becoming the service mesh platform that the industry would rally around. But, Google’s move has tempered those expectations.

The Knative Project was launched in mid-2018, with a focus on providing an open source set of components that allow for the building and deployment of container-based serverless applications that can be transported between cloud providers. Initial developers of the project included Google, IBM, Pivotal, SAP, and Red Hat. Pivotal has since been acquired by VMware and Red Hat was acquired by IBM.

The platform is targeted at unchaining current serverless development platforms that are tied to their respective cloud parents. These would include hosted services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda, Microsoft Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions.

However, the project and the serverless space in general have not evolved as fast as other cloud native segments. But, Knative does have some momentum. It was the dominate platform selected by participants in a recent CNCF survey, with 34% of those using an installable serverless platform tapping Knative. And a number of vendors have adopted Knative into their commercial offerings.