ActiveState, the developer of the private PaaS solution Stackato, has joined the Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA). This is a big milestone for the company, which puts a special emphasis on keeping its platform infrastructure-agnostic.

Stackato is an implementation of VMware’s open-source Cloud Foundry PaaS that was launched in September. The so-called private PaaS offering includes, among other things, tools to help migrate apps that resided behind a firewall to public and private clouds.

“We built Stackato as a private Cloud Foundry solution that doesn’t tie companies to one single infrastructure or hypervisor product… By joining the Cloud Foundry, we are proud to show our ongoing commitment to work with the widest array of hypervisor and infrastructure solutions to provide the options our users are demanding,” said Bart Copeland, President & CEO at ActiveState.

Stackato supports a long line-up of programming languages, including  Perl and Python (ActiveState owns the rights for these two languages), and a number of others.  It can run on VMware, Amazon EC2 and as of last week OpenStack, the open-source cloud OS initiative that  was kick-started by Rackspace and NASA.

OpenStack also had some pretty big developments recently.

Earlier this month RackSpace said it will hand over control of the project to the OpenStack Foundation, which will be established in 2012. There have been some speculations about the driving forces behind this decision – likely some of the biggest members of the ecosystem that didn’t like how Rackspace is managing it.

OpenStack is becoming a big deal as more and more companies become partners, and as the customer list expands. The technology itself is also maturing: Diablo launched in September, the fourth release of OpenStack Compute, OpenStack Object Storage and OpenStack Image Service.