There's a foundation that's a separate entity that owns the IP: https://www.cloudfoundry.org/membership/members/

As helloiamaperson said, the IP is owned by the Cloud Foundry Foundation. Pivotal has an interest in making Cloud Foundry awesome because we sell products and services based on it.

But IBM also has such an interest, so too HP and Fujitsu and NTT and Anynines and Intel and other members of the Foundation I've rudely neglected.

In a given team you can often find engineers from multiple companies. Or you'll find that different companies will provide a team. For example, the `cf` CLI was previously a Pivotal team, then a mixed Pivotal-IBM team, then an IBM team, now I believe Fujitsu are assigning engineers.

Voting rights in the Foundation are proportional to contributions, so it's in the interest of each participant to be generous in providing people, resources and IP. A defined high-level process, modelled after Pivotal's, is used to ensure a common approach to working on the platform -- pair programming, TDD, product management from a Tracker backlog and so forth. Every engineer goes through the same "dojo" onboarding.

I don't think anyone has ever tried anything quite like this before. At the corporate level it's press releases at twenty paces, but in the trenches it's a lot more seamless.