The graduation criteria has a distinct set of technical and project maturity hurdles that must be cleared:

https://github.com/cncf/toc/blob/master/process/graduation_c...

which includes complying with the Core Infrastructure Initiative requirements:

https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/en/criteria/0

It does have a marketing aspect, as all Linux Foundation projects do, but it's not pure fluff.

The terms "incubating" and "graduation" have meaning to others, even if you choose to ignore them:

https://www.cncf.io/projects/

CNCF projects have a maturity level of sandbox, incubating, or graduated, which corresponds to the Innovators, Early Adopters, and Early Majority tiers of the Crossing the Chasm diagram. The maturity level is a signal by CNCF as to what sorts of enterprises should be adopting different projects.

> Are there any foundations that don't operate like this?

Presumably. My main experiences are with the Apache Software Foundation, though, which in terms of "incubation" operates similarly to CNCF.

> Are foundations good at all for anything?

The answer is foundation-specific. But in general, foundations allow for pooling of resources and wisdom such as legal services, and allow for consumers to know a lot about a project's governance and status at a glance in a way which is difficult to ascertain for a standalone project on the web or Github or wherever.

> allow for consumers to know a lot about a project's governance and status

Although, as you say, the specifics vary by foundation and range quite a bit in how heavyweight they are, foundations also provide something of a neutral home for projects. A company may still be somewhat dominant in a given project but it can't just take its ball and go home to the degree possible if it kept control of domains, trademarks, and so forth on its own.

I deliberately left this point ambiguous. ;) The pressure on foundations to accommodate the wishes of major donors is immense and unceasing. Different foundations respond to that pressure in different ways.

I don't think it makes sense to assume that just because a project is at a foundation that it is independent by any useful definition. It's possible for dominant players to set things up such that they maintain effective control over the governance of a project which resides at a foundation. It's possible to generalize when you know the foundation, but it's not possible to generalize across all foundations.

I don't disagree with any of that. Certainly there are vast differences between Apache, OpenStack, and SPI, for example. And there can be considerable differences even between projects within a single foundation to the degree that a foundation like CNCF allows considerable latitude in how individual projects choose to organize.

In any case, if most of a project's committers are with a single company, that company is going to have a lot of control even if the project is nominally under generally neutral governance.

I looked at the list of graduated and incubating projects[1], and many of them from both categories are extremely important to the container landscape.

Here are ones I specifically know are important:

Graduated: kubernetes,prometheous,rook, helm, containerd, coredns

Incubating: CNI (Container Networking Interface), CRI-O, etcd, gRPC

[1] https://www.cncf.io/projects/

All these vendors had earlier incarnations in the open stack era (Iaas). Openstack is a big failure. Now, these vendors have moved to the next one: CNCF

There are ways to sort to limit the vendor-based solutions in the Landscape and just focus on open-source projects by the Linux Foundation and others that are considered official projects. It is an excellent invaluable resource IMO and they've done a great job so far.

most network engineering foundations (Network operator groups, IETF etc) are far more formal.

Which is both a good and a bad thing. On one hand, without marketing, getting a system adopted on a large scale is hard. (as evident by many RFC's which are not used a lot in the wild). On the other hand, the CNCF seems to have a zillion products which all solve roughly the same problem in the same problem space, which seems to make it unnecessary and complex.

But the LF/CNCF is doing branding wrong by putting their brand on tons of different software, most of it bad.

I hear ya. The point I was trying to make is that some private/public consortiums that appear to be regulatory institutions are mostly marketing associations. A quick check is to see if there is a large fee associated with joining and if the largest part of the association's budget is marketing/advertising.

Maybe I'm being pedantic but what bugs me is the 'C' in CNCF. The CNCF is mostly/all 'K'ubernetes specific which is a subset of the software that targets 'C'loud Infrastrture-as-a-Service. The term cloud-native has lost some meaning, at least in search results.

Yeah, some k8s people are trying to redefine "cloud native" as "uses k8s".

I worked for CNCF for two years up until about three months ago. Not one GCP person there.

In fact, there's been considerable pissiness between the CNCF and Google this year over governance of Istio and Knative although that's been somewhat worked out.