Although Google was the one which prepared it for production before its releasing, k8s originated from academia (more precisely, University of Massachusetts Amherst).
Ps.: check follow up comments. My comment in here is wrong.
My mistake. One of its founders has a PhD from there (thus my mistake), but k8s was actually created while he was working at Google, after his PhD (which has nothing to do with k8s..).
Apple have caught huge flak recently e.g. for the phone-local image scanning software.