Google should not be hiding it's ownership

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jtn...@gmail.com

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Dec 27, 2017, 5:27:41 PM12/27/17
to grpc.io
It's kinda incredible how I ended up on the gRPC site, was reasonably confident it was owned by Google, and yet Google has apparently gone out of it's way to hide Google's ownership of it.

https://grpc.io/ fails to openly indicate it is owned by Google anywhere obvious, the usual lines for terms and policy at the bottom of Google sites is missing.
- It is "©2017 gRPC" which is not a real entity as far as I can tell..
- https://grpc.io/about/ intentionally avoids listing the company that made it (Google) as one of the eight companies using it.
- Google finally appears in "The story behind gRPC" at the bottom.
- The FAQ, presumably trying to be cute, suggests it stands for "gRPC Remote Procedure Calls, of course!"
- Any attempt to pretend this isn't actually a Google property remains incredibly dishonest when you bother to whois it:
Registrant Organization: Google Inc.

Then the GitHub repository has it's own crime, suggesting that it's "Copyright 2015 The gRPC Authors" and links to its authors which seems all fine and dandy until you click it, and Google finally admits the sole "author" is Google Inc. here: https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/AUTHORS

April Kyle Nassi

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Dec 27, 2017, 7:52:05 PM12/27/17
to jtn...@gmail.com, grpc.io
Hi there! Google did found the gRPC project, and then donated it to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation for stewardship. It is an open source project, and contributions are welcome under the CNCF's CLA. 

As the CNCF donation was relatively recent there are still a few things under the Google name, such as the domain - we are in the process of transferring those over to CNCF. I'll go through all our repos and make sure it's reflected there as well! 

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Ihor Dvoretskyi

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Dec 28, 2017, 10:39:37 AM12/28/17
to April Kyle Nassi, jtn...@gmail.com, grpc.io
+1 April.

While gRPC was a Google-born project, today it's an open source community project under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) umbrella. You may find it listed on the CNCF website, together with other projects.

Nathaniel Manista

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Dec 28, 2017, 11:16:03 AM12/28/17
to jtn...@gmail.com, grpc.io
On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 2:27 PM, <jtn...@gmail.com> wrote:
- The FAQ, presumably trying to be cute, suggests it stands for "gRPC Remote Procedure Calls, of course!"

Jake Weisz

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Dec 28, 2017, 3:34:29 PM12/28/17
to April Kyle Nassi, grpc.io
Thank you for the clarification. I highly recommend sorting out
ownership/stewardship details as they appear on the website and the
GitHub repository. There is no designation anywhere I would expect to
see it that this now belongs to/is operated by the CNCF. At bare
minimum, I should've ideally been able to find this information in the
FAQ or About pages, if not in the copyright notices on either the
website or GitHub.
-Jacob Weisz
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