Always willing to take the heat for convening a Friday afternoon Google hangout, The New Stack founder Alex Williams is begrudgingly joined by co-hosts Donnie Berkholz of RedMonk and Michael Coté of 451 Research for this episode of The New Stack Analysts, because not only is there a podcast to record, but there is also news to discuss regarding the launch of Cloud Foundry Foundation as a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project.

While The New Stack has already run a piece on Cloud Foundry’s move, on this occasion Alex and Michael hear Donnie’s first-hand perspective on what this move represents. A veteran of foundation-building in connection with Gentoo Linux, Donnie prefaces his remarks by disclosing that IBM and Pivotal are clients of RedMonk.

“It used to be,” says Donnie, “that if you’re going to go open source, you’re obviously going to be a foundation.”

“We figured out that if you want to legitimize your project – if you want to get contributions from other vendors, from users – you have to send it to, for example, the Apache Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, maybe the Linux Foundation, maybe Outercurve Foundation more recently.”

“Over the past five or six years, that perception has started to change,” says Donnie. Projects such as Node became popular among users and vendors without having any foundation connection. So do foundations still provide any value?

“They still provide the value of neutrality,” Donnie says; vendors and co-opters alike have more guarantees about governance with a foundation, versus a lack of trust in less transparent entities, and particularly in startups. Also, he says, drawing from his own experience, outsourcing the heavy lifting – time, paperwork, lawyers – to an umbrella foundation while obtaining the benefits thereof is a wise move.

Alex wonders, who holds the trademark? Later, he notes the degree to which Docker‘s problems can be attributed to trademark management.

Donnie believes that the Cloud Foundry Foundation will hold the intellectual property. “You can have confidence that there is a neutral third party in the form of the Cloud Foundry Foundation behind all of this, while you’ve got (the Linux Foundation) who’s more experienced and who’s been a good outsourcer for a number of different groups like OpenDaylight.”

Feeling as though he is “fighting the old wars” perhaps, Michael is curious about the licensing aspect, seeing how Cloud Foundry is licensed under a permissive license, whereas Linux is GPL.

Different communities respond in very different ways based on the kind of license and, more importantly, the community standards it encourages, says Donnie. “A lot of developers don’t necessarily care about the license but they buy into the ideas behind it.”

“I think it’s interesting how some of the umbrellas have started to diversify in terms of their licenses in recent years,” says Donnie, “trying to follow the way technology is changing and the way people perceive the value of foundations.”

“It’s no longer infrastructure-centric, because everyone’s living on GitHub or something like it. It’s maybe even no longer license-centric.”

So, Alex asks, should Docker establish their own foundation?

“They’re just earlier in the life-cycle than Cloud Foundry; I think they will go down a very, very similar path based on how long they’ve been around, and the kinds of vendors getting involved, and the kinds of users getting involved,” says Donnie, who expects IBM’s involvement will likely increase the pressure for tangible steps toward structure in both governance and community.