Pivotal, the buzzed-about cloud analytics venture that spun out of EMC and VMware early last year, is establishing a formal open governance model for Cloud Foundry to give the community a bigger voice in the development of the platform. The reins will be handed over to an independent foundation that is set to begin operations this summer.

The move marks the end point of a very long journey for Cloud Foundry, which began its life at a little-known San Mateo startup as a proprietary tool for scaling Java applications on Amazon EC2. The solution got scooped up by SpringSource in August 2009, just over a week after the enterprise software specialist was itself acquired by VMware, and augmented with advanced management functionality and other value-added features. Two years later, the virtualization giant released the source code under an Apache 2.0 license in a bid to accelerate the adoption of the service, which by that time had already become quite popular among developers thanks to its ease of use and elasticity. Keeping things simple for users has remained the number one priority to this very day, according to Pivotal’s Dekel Tankel.

“We see Cloud Foundry as a PaaS, it’s a platform-as-a-service that sits on top of infrastructure-as-a-service such as OpenStack and really focuses on giving developers what they want, which is to just do code and not plumming, not meddle with web servers, app servers and VMs. They just want to do code and be productive,” Tankel, who heads product marketing for Cloud Foundry, said in an interview on theCUBE (full segment below). Pivotal came to own the project after it was deemed non-core by VMware along with the rest of the assets from SpringSource.

The EMC federation is putting its full weight behind the newly announced Cloud Foundry Foundation along with IBM, HP, Rackspace and SAP, which are joining the organization as founding platinum sponsors. The roster also includes “Gold” tier members ActiveState and CenturyLink.

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