After a couple of false starts over the last couple of years, the Open Cloud Initiative (OCI) has been resurrected to advocate for royalty-free open standards in cloud computing with a set of Open Cloud Principles (OCP) that are unlikely to be universally accepted.

It says its purpose is "to provide a legal framework within which the greater cloud computing community of users and providers can reach consensus on a set of requirements for Open Cloud, as described in the document, and then apply those requirements to cloud computing products and services, again by way of community consensus."

There will be a 30-day comment period on the Open Cloud Principles, which are described as focused on "interoperability, avoiding barriers to entry or exit and ensuring technological neutrality."

They define specific requirements for open standards and mandate their use for formats and interfaces, calling for "multiple full, faithful and interoperable implementations," at least one of which is open source.

The full text of the Principles is at http://www.opencloudinitiative.org/principles.

OCI founder and president Sam Johnston said in a canned statement that "The primary purpose of the Open Cloud Initiative is to define "Open Cloud" by way of community consensus and advocate for universal adoption of Open Standard formats and interfaces. Inspired by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), we aim to find a balance between protecting important user freedoms and enabling providers to build successful businesses."

It's got a vision of a global cloud of clouds or "Intercloud," interconnected by open standard interfaces exchanging open standard formats.