OpenGitOps is a CNCF sandbox working group that publishes a vendor-neutral specification for what “GitOps” actually means, rather than a runnable piece of software. It exists so that Argo CD, Flux, Jenkins X, Weave GitOps, and other tools can claim GitOps conformance against a shared definition instead of everyone redefining the term.
The project’s main artefact is a short set of principles: the desired state of a system is declarative, versioned and immutable, pulled automatically, and continuously reconciled. Around those principles, the GitOps Working Group maintains a glossary, conformance criteria, and reference documentation that tool authors and platform teams can cite. There is no controller or CLI here; the deliverables are markdown specs in the open-gitops/documents and open-gitops/project repositories.
OpenGitOps was founded by Weaveworks, Codefresh, GitHub, Microsoft, Red Hat, and others, accepted into the CNCF sandbox in 2021, and released under Apache-2.0. Treat it as the terminological and conformance layer underneath the actual implementations — Argo CD and Flux being the two dominant reconcilers most teams will end up running.
