The Open Container Initiative (OCI) was formed in June 2015. Their main goal was to establish common standards for software containers. It was originally named the Open Container Project and later became a Linux Foundation project. Founding members included CoreOS, Amazon Web Services, Apcera, Cisco, EMC, Fujitsu, Goldman Sachs, Google, HP, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Joyent, Mesosphere, Microsoft, Pivotal, Rancher Labs, Red Hat, and VMware Docker.
Initially, OCI began creating run-time standard specs, but later the group agreed to deal with container image format specs.