Open Container Initiative to Benefit from Linux Foundation Relationship

The Open Container Initiative, which, as we reported, was formed last June to build the future direction of container technology, has embarked on its self-governance and new status as a collaborative project of the Linux Foundation.

As InformationWeek reports: "The primary body is the OCI's Technical Developer Community, which includes the 26 contributors to the OCI specification, its runtime, and reference implementation, plus the nine maintainers who review and approve the work going into each OCI component. The maintainers include those from OCI founders Docker, CoreOS, Google, and Huawei, plus five from other community members."

This is good news on the container front. Red Hat began speaking of the importance of set and open standards in the container sector a while back saying, 'The core tenets of container infrastructure are the primitives for creating, distributing, running and managing containers, and we work towards avoiding fragmentation at this level, with the end goal of enabling innovation and customer value and delivering an answer to businesses concerned about adopting an "emerging" technology like containers.'

Red Hat added: "Why does Red Hat care so much about Linux containers and open standards? Containers split the traditional operating system into two parts: the small footprint runtime inside containers and the host operating system on which the container runs. The container format and runtime are critical components to bring these two together and build value on top, to scale-out across clusters of hosts and manage the security, performance and resilience of infrastructure and applications. Open standards deliver more interoperability, the ability to reuse tools and investment protection."

Throughout this year, container technology and Docker in particular have been red hot. The OCI also has a roadmap, found here.  It supplies many goals related to the behavior and lifecycle of container technologies.

 The Linux Foundation has proven to be a good steward for many open source projects, and the Open Container Initiative will benefit from its relationship with the foundation.