An open-source project for vendor-neutral containers has come to life.

The Open Container Initiative (OCI) has been ushered into existence with the creation of a technical governance structure.

Also, nine new companies have joined the group’s original founding members – Dell is among the latest signups.

The new structure allows anybody to contribute. A Technical Developer Community has been formed with independent maintainers and maintainers from founding members including Docker, CoreOS, Google and Huawei.

CoreOS is behind Rocket, the container runtime alternative to Docker that launched a year ago.

The TDC is responsible for maintaining the project and handling releases of the runtime and specification.

A Technical Oversight Board will be appointed and will include members of the OCI and TDC. Its job will be to ensure consistency and workflow across projects.

A Trademark Board has also been created to police the brand and its enforcement.

The OCI will work on tools and runtimes that are composable, portable, secure, decentralized, open, simple and that are backwards-compatible.

The OCI was formed in June, founded on draft specifications submitted by popular new container newcomer Docker.

Docker submitted documents for base format, runtime and code for a reference implementation.

There have been two updates since June, with plans for Docker to integrate the latest version of runC into future releases of its container architecture and Cloud Foundry.

Among those on board with OCI are Amazon Web Services, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Mesosphere, Microsoft, Oracle, Pivotal, Red Hat, Twitter and VMware. ®