Open Container Initiative (OCI), a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project, has announced a new initiative called the OCI Image Format project. The primary goal of the new project is to create a software container image format spec with security and federated naming as key components. The OCI Image Format project is hosted on GitHub.

According to the announcement, “This represents an expansion of the OCI’s first project, OCI Runtime Spec, that focuses on how to run containers. Industry leaders are collaborating to enable users to package and sign their application, then run it in any container runtime environment of their choice -- such as Docker or rkt. With the development of the new OCI Image Specification for container images, both vendors and users can benefit from a common standard that is widely deployable across any supporting environment of the user’s choice.”

Jonathan Boulle of CoreOS, a company that develops a lightweight Linux distribution for container deployment, praised the formation of the OCI Image Format project and wrote in a blog post, “An open, and openly implementable container image format specification underpins all the portability goals of containers, allowing users to build and package a container once, sign it, and run it in a variety of vendor implementations and platforms, in the cloud and on-premises.”