Can we see a design document/theory of operations, please? It’s difficult to evaluate this effort without understanding exactly what it is - namely, the constituent components, their respective functions, how they work and relate to one another, etc.

The docs repo gives a high level overview and a deeper dive into each of the components with samples:

https://github.com/knative/docs/blob/master/README.md

a bit off topic, i think this 'serverless' thing certainly will create lot of jobs, what a messy architecture, good for ibm, : )

@markusthoemmes could you kindly comment on how OpenWhisk<-->Knative interact or live together or side by side

This of course needs to be discussed in the broader OpenWhisk community first, but taking dewitt's answer here into perspective (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17604185) and also based on what IBM has put out in their statement a possible interaction could be to layer OpenWhisk's higher level abstractions and multi-tenancy features over the knative stack and use the latter as an "execution-engine".

In technical terms, OpenWhisk's invoker system could be replaced by knative, keeping the API/Controller bits stable to still support the notion of actions/triggers/rules/sequences/compositions you name it.