As you may have already seen elsewhere, we have applied to contribute Podman, Buildah, and Skopeo to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).  Joining the CNCF will help us keep building each of these project’s commitments to open source, transparency, and community involvement. The engineering team you already know will keep working on the projects you love. In fact, we hope to attract more contributions and involvement with the community.

We launched each of these projects around nine years ago with Skopeo starting in 2015, Buildah in 2016, and Podman shortly thereafter.  These projects originated from the need to find a place for the capabilities the community wanted but could not fit elsewhere.  We developed these projects with specific features to build a more functional and secure container experience.

We have submitted our application to the CNCF’s Technical Organizing Committee. That application will wait in a queue until the Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) can review and vote on it; likely sometime around May 2025. If you’re already an active member of the CNCF community, please give our application votes of support.

In the meantime, we are hard at work on Podman.  You do not have to wait for us to join the CNCF to become a contributor, take a look at our contributing guide now, and join one of our meetings or discussion channels.  Most of all, give Podman a try if you have not already.

For more information on how the CNCF will help any open source project, I encourage you to familiarize yourself with them.

As our application progresses, we’ll provide updates to the community.