In April 2013, Dell EMC and VMware formed a new company called Pivotal. Each parent company contributed people, software, products, and collateral that were not core to their own business to this new entity. This included 11 companies that had been acquired by the parent companies at one point or another. Soon after, with further investment from additional companies, such as General Electric, Ford, and Microsoft, Pivotal's mission focused sharply on transforming the way the world makes software.
Cloud Foundry, along with several other notable projects like the Spring Framework for Java (https://spring.io) and RabbitMQ (http://www.rabbitmq.com) for message brokering, were included in the Pivotal origin story.
Soon after its creation, Pivotal, together with other enterprise leaders, sought to create the Cloud Foundry Foundation to ensure the ongoing stewardship of the Cloud Foundry community and its open source software. The foundation was created as an independent non-profit under the Linux Foundation. Since its founding in January 2015, over 70 companies (https://www.cloudfoundry.org/members/) have joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation and continue the mission to drive the global awareness and adoption of the Cloud Foundry open source project, to grow a vibrant community of contributors, and to create coherence in strategy and action across all member companies for the sake of the project.
The Cloud Foundry Foundation exists to:
- Establish and sustain Cloud Foundry as the global industry standard PaaS open source technology with a thriving ecosystem
- Deliver continuous quality, value, and innovation to users, operators, and providers of Cloud Foundry technology
- Provide a vibrant, agile experience for the community’s contributors that delivers the highest quality cloud-native applications and software, at high velocity with global scale
