The Open Container Project is a lightweight, open governance structure, to be formed under the auspices of the Linux Foundation, for the express purpose of creating open industry standards around container formats and runtime. The OCP was launched on June 22nd 2015: Press Release, FAQ.

Project Sponsors: Apcera, AWS, Cisco, CoreOS, Docker, EMC, Fujitsu, Google, Goldman Sachs, HP, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Joyent, Pivotal, the Linux Foundation, Mesosphere, Microsoft, Rancher, Red Hat, VMWare

In the past two years, there has been rapid growth in both interest in and usage of container-based solutions. Almost all major IT vendors and cloud providers have announced container-based solutions, and there has been a proliferation of start-ups founded in this area as well. While the proliferation of ideas in this space is welcome, the promise of containers as a source of application portability requires the establishment of certain standards around format and runtime. While the rapid growth of the Docker project has served to make the Docker image format a de facto standard for many purposes, there is widespread interest in a more formal, open, industry specification, which is:

• not bound to higher level constructs such as a particular client or orchestration stack
• not tightly associated with any particular commercial vendor or project
• portable across a wide variety of operating systems, hardware, CPU architectures, public clouds, etc.

The specification will be available at https://github.com/opencontainers/specs. The newly expanded team of maintainers (both original libcontainer maintainers and the appc maintainers) are busy preparing the first draft of the specification, and intend to release it in 2-3 weeks.

Docker is donating its container format and runtime, runC, to the OCP to serve as the cornerstone of this new effort. It is available now at https://github.com/opencontainers/runc.