Pivotal's Cloud Foundry becomes open source foundation

Pivotal said Monday that its Cloud Foundry effort, a platform-as-a-service project will formally adopt and open source foundation model with backing from enterprise technology's heavy hitters.

With the move Pivotal will form the Cloud Foundry Foundation, which will be backed by ActiveState, CenturyLink, EMC, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Rackspace, SAP and VMware.

Cloud Foundry is already licensed under Apache 2.0 and will keep that format as its governance model changes.

Pivotal said that the Cloud Foundry ecosystem has more than 750 contributors. The aim is to plug Cloud Foundry as an open platform-as-a-service (PaaS) alternative.

What's unclear is how Cloud Foundry will ultimately shape up against Red Hat's OpenShift and other PaaS efforts. Cloud Foundry can be deployed to Amazon Web Services, OpenStack, VMware's vCloud and vSphere and locally.

Here's a look at the Cloud Foundry components.