The industry’s hottest open-source platform-as-a-a-service (PaaS) stack is entering the next stage of its evolution with the inaugurat ion of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, which is officially taking over responsibility for its namesake project from the EMC federation. The launch marks the latest chapter in what has been an unusually long journey dating back more than five years to a San Mateo-based startup with a proprietary tool for running Java applications on Amazon EC2.

Shortly after hitting the scene, Cloud Foundry came to the attention of enterprise development powerhouse SpringSource Inc., which ended up buying the company in August of 2009. A week later, SpringSource was itself acquired by EMC virtualization subsidiary VMware for $420 million. From there, Cloud Foundry morphed into a highly automated platform for deploying enterprise services, abandoning the proprietary route along the way for an open-source model that attracted a vibrant ecosystem of users and contributors.

After VMware decided to exit the application development market last year to focus on its core virtualization business, the project moved under the responsibility of spin-off Pivotal Software Inc., which proceeded to establish the Cloud Foundry Foundation in February. The initiative has since attracted 40 members.

Recent additions to that group include major consultancies, carriers such as Verzion Communications Inc. that are trying to build out their own hosting platforms and even industrial firms like General Electronic Co., which is placing a big emphasis on cloud computing as part of its “Industrial Internet” initiative. Another notable member is Hortonworks Inc.. the first Hadoop distributor to file for a public offering. It’s looking to make it easier for developers to write applications on its version of the batch processing framework.

Also joining the fray is Intel, which is assuming the tenth and final spot on the Cloud Foundry Foundation’s board alongside the organization’s foundation members. The council is now coordinating the development of the project under the auspices of the Linux Foundation, which is providing logistical and legal assistance.

Noticeably absent from the consortium is Amazon, whose public cloud is one of the top destinations for deploying Cloud Foundry but also includes a competing PaaS called BeanStalk. Other no-shows are fellow infrastructure-as-a-service titans Google and Microsoft, which are both pushing their own solutions to developers.

But while it may not have the endorsement of the cloud’s Big Three, the foundation has some early traction. The amount of code contributed to Cloud Foundry surged 1,700 percent from last year, momentum that is likely to increase now that the organization is in place.

Image via Wikimedia Commons