This past week in the cloud featured a number of developments, a big portion of which tie in with the open-source movement. Free and vendor-agnostic alternatives to proprietary offerings  are really picking up momentum, especially the few products that are spearheading this trend’s growth.

One of them is Cloud Foundry, the open PaaS created by VMware. It has received very high ratings from developers, and there’s an impressive number of third party commercial solutions built on top of it, although one of the newer ones may turn out to be partially homegrown.

Derek Collison, the former chief architect of Foundry at VMware left the company to work on his own project – a new startup that will base its portfolio on the platform.  The unconfirmed update came through this week; Collison finally decided to drop VMware and develop a Foundry-OpenStack hybrid distribution after an internal copyright quarrel.

Speaking of OpenStack, the cloud OS also had some big news this week. The fifth release, codenamed Essex, rolled out, bringing with it more stability and enhancements to usability across the board. The latest OpenStack version will be shipped with Ubuntu Server 12.04 when it hits general availability.

While the Foundry pot is being stirred and OpenStack is expanding, VMware is doing its own thing in the personal cloud.  This week the virtualization provider gave the blogosphere a glimpse of two upcoming hosted software offerings that will make it easier for workers to collaborate and share their data.

Many vendors are recognizing the demand behind this type of functionality in the mobile enterprise, alongside other things like accessibility. Cloud CRM developer Nimble set up its platform entirely around these features, and recently extended that with the addition of direct Chrome integration.