You'd do better to point out which distinction you think the parent poster is missing.
My guess is that Prometheus cannot do distributed tracing, while OpenTelemetry can. Is that what you meant?
My guess is that Prometheus cannot do distributed tracing, while OpenTelemetry can. Is that what you meant?
Some companies (ie: Datadog) are contributing to the tooling but I think most companies would rather spend dev time on their own platforms than something that anybody (competitor) can use.
My teammate said that at a previous job he wanted to add OpenTelemetry tracing to some C++ code he was working on. He took one look at the reference implementation for C++ OpenTelemetry and decided instead to write his own tracing library that sends gRPC to the OpenTelemetry collector.
It's also worth noting that, at least last time I checked, the reference implementations per programming language are less like reference implementations of some specification, and more like "this is the code you use to do OpenTelemetry in this language."