The Open Container Initiative (previously known as the Open Container Project) published its draft charter for comment and announced that 11 new companies are joining this industry-wide initiative to develop common standards for software containers. The OCI, which was announced just last month at DockerCon and is being hosted at The Linux Foundation as a Collaborative Project.
Companies signaling their formal commitment to this effort include AT&T, ClusterHQ, Datera, Kismatic, Kyup, Midokura, Nutanix, Oracle, Polyverse, Resin.io, Sysdig, SUSE, Twitter and Verizon. Amazon Web Services, Apcera, Cisco, CoreOS, Docker, EMC, Fujitsu Limited, Goldman Sachs, Google, HP, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Joyent, Mesosphere, Microsoft, Pivotal, Rancher Labs, Red Hat and VMware are also committed to the Open Container Initiative.
As part of the formation, Docker Inc. donated its base container format at runtime to serve as cornerstone technologies under the governance of the OCI, while leadership from Application Container spec (“appc”) is also represented.
The OCI said work is underway on the draft specification, which is expected to be available for community comment within the month.
“The overwhelming interest in the Open Container Initiative is representative of both the opportunity containers offer for application development and the challenges we face with fragmentation,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. “With such strong community support and collaboration, we’re confident this effort will rise to the opportunity.”
