Cloud-computing project Cloud Foundry could become a lot more popular

Cloud Foundry, an open-source cloud-computing project for quickly building and running applications, could become a lot more popular in the months to come. That’s because it won’t be under the rule of a single company anymore. Today Pivotal, Cloud Foundry‘s “steward,” announced that it will work with a bunch of other big technology companies to launch the Cloud Foundry Foundation, effectively letting more people decide the direction of the project.

Open source PaaS initiative Cloud Foundry (disclosure, I’m an adviser toActiveState, a contributor to Cloud Foundry via their acquisition last year of Appsecute) is undeniably gaining the majority of the market attention when it comes to enterprise PaaS. While smaller startups like Apprenda, and other open source initiatives like Red Hat’s OpenShift are also competing in the marketplace, Cloud Foundry has managed to corner the market when it comes to industry buy in – large vendors such as IBM IBM -0.8%, Verizon and HP have bought into the initiative as well as smaller vendors such as ActiveState (see disclosure above) and Tier3 (recently acquired byCenturyLink CTL -0.1%).