Cloud Foundry Spins Out as Separate Open Source PaaS Group
Pivotal on Monday said it will spin off its Cloud Foundry Platform as a Service (PaaS) open source project, which will have its own governance model by this summer.
Joining the effort as founding members of the new foundation are Pivotal's parent company EMC and VMware, along with IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Rackspace, SAP, telecommunications provider CenturyLink (which operates the Savvis cloud services) and ActiveState.
Cloud Foundry is an Apache License 2.0 project. As it transitions into an independent foundation, the licenses will carry over, as well, Pivotal said. Spun off last year from EMC and VMware, Pivotal said Cloud Foundry has benefited under its stewardship with 750 contributors.
The move looks to create an open source PaaS just as Rackspace's contribution of OpenStack to an independent foundation has done for open source Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). By creating a foundation, the goal is to create portability and interoperability among public and private PaaS offerings. Some public and private PaaS cloud offerings are already built on Cloud Foundry, including the SoftLayer public cloud that IBM acquired last year for $2 billion.
Describing it as a strong complement to its commitment to OpenStack, IBM talked up its plans to join the Cloud Foundry foundation at its annual Pulse conference, taking place this week in Las Vegas.
"The enthusiasm from the development community to leverage this open Platform as a Service is immense," said Dave Lindquist, an IBM Fellow and CTO for the company's Smarter Cloud infrastructure, during the opening keynote presentation at Pulse. "We are expecting tremendous growth around the Cloud Foundry ecosystem."
Robert LeBlanc, senior VP for middleware in IBM's software group, used the opening keynote to chide those who aren't participating. Asked whom he was referring to, LeBlanc declined to name any company, but obvious players that are not participating are Amazon Web Services, Citrix, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Salesforce.com.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 02/24/2014 at 2:32 PM