Adds ko to sandbox

[mchmarny]

Description of the PR

Hello TOC and CNCF community, please consider this PR as a proposal for ko to become a CNCF project at sandbox level.

What is ko?

ko is a simple, fast container image builder for Go applications. It's ideal for use cases where the image contains a single Go application without many dependencies on the OS base image (e.g. no cgo or OS package dependencies). ko builds images by effectively executing go build on a local machine, and as such doesn't require docker. ko is also a good fit for lightweight CI/CD use cases given its multi-platform support and automatic SBOM generation capabilities.

Why ko in CNCF?

Even before Google’s release as a stand-alone project in March 2019, ko has proven to be indispensable to the Knative community (which has now been accepted as CNCF incubation project), as a simple, fast, and secure container image builder for Go applications. Today the broader open source community and many enterprise development teams depend on ko to improve their developer productivity. The ko project is also increasingly used as a solution for a number of build use-cases, and is being integrated into a variety of third party CI/CD tools.

Open source comes with a responsibility to contribute, sustain, and improve the projects that make our ecosystem better. To support the next phase of community-driven innovation, enable net-new adoption patterns, and to further raise the bar in the container tool industry, ko needs a vendor-neutral foundation.

We believe that CNCF is the right foundation where ko can meet the evolving needs of the community. Being part of CNCF will bring the ko community closer to other Cloud native projects in the ecosystem, including many of the projects which already depend on ko. Being in the same foundation will enable ko to better collaborate and has a potential to increase the velocity of feedback and innovation over time.

On behalf of the ko project community,

Mark Chmarny

[amye]

You want https://applysandbox.cncf.io/ - that form is the current process for applying for sandbox.

[mchmarny]

Hm, @amye is that recent? I'm seeing PRs merging sandbox projects as recently <1 month ago? The concern I am having is that the Google Form does not result in any linkable artifact. If there is a way to re-open the PR (now that it was made) that would be great.

[amye]

This change was made as of June 2020, what's being merged in is sandbox annual reviews.

https://github.com/cncf/toc/tree/main/process#project-proposal-requirements has details on this process, and https://github.com/cncf/toc/blob/main/docs/projects.md notes when the project was proposed.

https://sandbox.cncf.io/ has the current queue of applications for sandbox projects. Our next sandbox inclusion meeting is November 8, 2022, but the TOC very rarely gets through all of the applications in one meeting.