Cloud Foundry Foundation Launches as Linux Foundation Collaborative Project

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The Cloud Foundry Foundation officially launched today as a non-profit effort that will be managed as a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project. Cloud Foundry is an open-source Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) project that was originally started by VMware in 2011 and then spun out to VMware’s sister company Pivotal.

The new Cloud Foundry Foundation benefits from the support of EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Pivotal, SAP and VMware, who are all platinum members of the new effort. In total there are over 40 member companies joining the Cloud Foundry Foundation. The Cloud Foundry Foundation will be run as a Linux Foundation Collaborative project that leverages the resources and expertise of the Linux Foundation in running open-source projects to the table.

“The news is that the Cloud Foundry Foundation is live and fully operational,” Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation told Datamation. “It means millions of dollars in shared resources come into action that helps to build better collaboration, test and development infrastructure.”

Zemlin added that the Cloud Foundry Foundation is also unique in its efforts to help accelerate developer involvement. In many open source projects, it can often be a long and arduous path for developers to be granted commit access for contributing code. The Cloud Foundry Foundation has a ‘Programming Dojo’ approach that mentors new developers in the proper procedures and best practices of the project. Those that go through the Programming Dojo process have a fast track to getting commit access to the project.

The Linux Foundation is involved to run the back-end operations for the Cloud Foundry Foundation.

“What we’re looking to do is help the Cloud Foundry Foundation with all the things that are necessary for large-scale collaboration,” Zemlin said.

James Watters, vice president of Cloud Foundry Product and Ecosystem at Pivotal, explained to Datamation that the Cloud Foundry Foundation effort was first announced in April. The challenge to create the Foundation outside of Pivotal and making it real is what the Linux Foundation will be helping to execute as the foundation goes live today.

“As we transition the Cloud Foundry project from Pivotal to an actual foundation we needed a partner to hand off too and I’m excited to work with the Linux Foundation,” Watters said.

Watters said that the Cloud Foundry Foundation is a third party neutral effort, where Pivotal is a member. He emphasized that Cloud Foundry Foundation is arm’s length from Pivotal and it works in the best interest of the entire Cloud Foundry community.

Compliance

Last month, Red Hat EVP and President Paul Cormier took aim at Cloud Foundry as being a fragmented effort. Watters emphasized that the with the Cloud Foundry Foundation, the issue of potential fragmentation is not a risk as there is a strong effort to prevent that from happening.

“If you use the Cloud Foundry name it means something and it is a discrete thing, not a loose association of things that are forked off of each other,” Watters said. “We have a definition of Cloud Foundry that is pretty extensive.”

The definition mandates that certain components from the open source community tree version of Cloud Foundry be included in a product for it to be considered to be a Cloud Foundry product.

“That means an application running in one Cloud Foundry product should be able to run in another company’s Cloud Foundry deployment,” Watters said. “The vendors will really compete on support, management tools and overall trust to win the business, but customers will always win because Cloud Foundry will always be consistent.”

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Datamation and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist

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