Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. For this week’s episode, we spoke with Chris DiBona, director of open source at Google, about Google’s launch of the Open Usage Commons, an independent company to help open source projects better manage their trademarks.

In a blog post, DiBona notes that trademarks sit at the juncture of the rule-of-law and the philosophy of open source. So for this episode, we wanted to find out more about how they interact and how Google is attempting to improve the management of trademarks in an open source way. We also wanted to address the rumors that this organization was created to manage Google’s Istio open source service mesh in lieu of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (DiBona’s answer: no).

TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside TNS senior editor Richard MacManus, and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.