The great thing about a fork is it's a good way to split the community and show that you don't care about some portion of the contributors.

Instead, all the participants (Google and non-Google) got together and did the hard work to figure out what would actually meet everyone's needs, and then updated the governance to match the compromise.

(Just FYI, as a participant in the process.) This comes out like a game of telephone. What's actually happened is:

1. The community requested clarification and a path for non-(Google, IBM/RedHat, VMware) particpants to participate in the Steering Committee, which defines the rules and processes for the community, including project governance. Paul Morie (Red Hat) and Brenda Chan (VMware) put together an initial proposal for community-elected steering seats.
2. The Google half of the steering committee objected to the plan, citing concerns about trademark governance and the ability of vendors to get what they need out of the project (to justify their investment of possibly dozens of senior engineers).
3. Breaking the stalemate, Ron Avnur (Google) proposed separating Steering's responsibility into trademark (vendor-controlled) seats, and steering (elected) committees, where trademark is responsible for determining the trademark rules (including conformance and what the brands are) and steering is responsible for governance and managing the community.

The end result is:

1. There will be elections in October/November for 2 steering seats (3 will be held as bootstrap until the next year). By the end of next year, all 5 steering committee seats will be community-elected. There are also rules in place preventing any company from holding more than 2 steering seats.
2. Any company providing at least 15% of the contributions in the previous year will be invited to join the trademark committee. All vendors on the committee will have veto power on the committee recommendations.
3. Google is retaining the Knative trademark and will be advised by the trademark committee.

Google will still have at least one seat on each of Trademark, Steering, and the Technical Oversight Committees at the end of the process, but none of the committees will have a vendor majority in December. Google will still have custody of the trademark on behalf of the project, rather than donating the trademark to an independent foundation. And _all_ of the code will still be Apache/Creative Commons licensed, as they have been since day one.

Hope that clears things up.