At the recent Dockercon which took place in San Francisco, California, Docker's founder and CTO, Solomon Hykes announced the Open Container Project (OCP), which aims to achieve standardization for container format to enable developers to develop common container-based solutions. As part of the OCP initiative, Docker will donate the code for its software container format and its runtime, as well as the associated specifications.
The OCP initiative kicked off with founding members - Docker, CoreOS, AWS, Cisco, EMC, Fujitsu, Goldman Sachs, Google, HP, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Pivotal, and VMware - and will be housed under the Linux Foundation, said Docker. Docker added that apart from its software container donation, OCP will benefit from the leadership and support of the Application Container spec (“appc”) initiative and from its founding member, CoreOS.
Docker also said that the container movement has gained immense popularity among users with the promise of portability, agility and interoperability it brings to a broad set of insfrastructures and tools.
Solomon Hykes, founder and creator of the Docker open source initiative
After receiving feedback from the community, partners and customers, we believe the timing is right to create a common standard that would ensure compatibility and encourage innovation throughout the ecosystem. It is for this reason that we are donating our container format and runtime to the standard. We believe that after two years, the Docker container runtime code and technology have matured to the point that they would benefit from independent governance outside the Docker project.
Dr. Cheng Lu Wang, the president of Central Software Institute in Huawei
Containers warrant a common format and collaborative development approach to that work. We see the forming of the Open Container Project as a very good move for unifying forces in this area. The standardization and open governance nature of this initiative will help attract more talents and organizations to participate, which will in turn stimulate innovations in various layers, while still keeping the core to stay consolidated.
