The Hyperledger project has come a long way in making the innovative blockchain technology used in Bitcoin a viable option for secure business transactions; hear more from Christopher Ferris in this keynote at the Open Source Leadership Summit.
Why Open Collaboration Is Crucial for Blockchain Tech
The one-year-old Hyperledger Project has already come a long way in making the innovative blockchain technology used in Bitcoin a viable option for secure business transactions. That was the clear message from Christopher Ferris in his keynote at the Open Source Leadership Summit in February.
Ferris, the CTO of open technology at IBM and member of Hyperledger’s leadership, said Hyperledger and blockchain technology could be enormously successful in private enterprise securing and verifying rapid, high value, and highly private transactions. Additionally, the collaborative open source foundation is nearing release of its production-ready distributed ledger code base, Fabric.
“We have the ability to think about how we might instrument all these different types of [private transactions] and essentially in antagonistic type environment and yet know that the information could be trusted,” Ferris said, “and that everybody actually shares the same copy of information.”
There are a few hurdles to clear first, Ferris said, and the project is still very young. The biggest issue is probably perception; Ferris said Bitcoin was built by anarchists looking to disrupt the banking industry and has had some notorious heists and scandals in its short history. That makes enterprise CEOs and CTOs a touch skittish.
Ferris said that’s why good governance and a truly open and collaborative environment are crucial for blockchain tech, and that’s precisely what Hyperledger is looking to provide. The organization currently has five top-level projects under its umbrella. They are:
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Sawtooth Lake – A distributed ledger technology written in Python, supporting both permissioned and permissionless deployments.
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Iroha – A simple, decentralized ledger design for mobile clients.
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Fabric – A foundation for blockchain applications with a modular architecture that allows components, such as consensus, messaging, identity, and encryption services to be plug-and-play.
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Cello – Orchestration for delivering blockchain as a service.
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Blockchain Explorer- A user interface for exploring the state of the ledger.
Fabric is the project closest to a general release; each of these projects is led by a different team and is working to ensure interoperability with the other projects.
“Our goal is obviously to develop and create open source solutions for these technologies,” Ferris said, “and to provide that neutral open governance model to sustain these things. To develop a diverse ecosystem of communities. To educate the public and government and so forth on what this technology is, how it can be applied. To educate ourselves by bringing people together to help us explore different ways that the technology might be used in various industries. Then, again, to promote this notion of a community of communities.”
Another issue the technology has is generally slow throughput; Bitcoin can handle only about seven transactions per second, Ferris said.
“Anybody who’s been working on any kind of enterprise systems know that ain’t going to cut it for just about anything,” he said. “If you wanted to apply that technology to your ERP system for instance to track all the shipments and invoices and whatnot that go on in your enterprise, it’s not going to do it.”
Ferris said Hyperledger, which was started in February 2016, has grown from 30 general members to more than 110 in just a year. Two more premier members have joined in that time — Airbus and American Express — and Ferris said there are others in the pipeline. The project is growing rapidly and has a significant amount of momentum because it’s a very useful technology that’s almost perfect for open source, he said.
“This is a technology that is essentially perfect for open source,” Ferris said. “It’s potentially very revolutionary. We don’t want to have any one player in the ecosystem that controls all of it. We don’t want it to be monetized only by in IBM or somebody like that. We want it to be used universally by multiple parties.
“It requires special skills and it requires a diverse set of special skills. You have to have deep cryptographic capabilities, deep understanding of distributed computing, containerization, databases, database query engines and so forth. There’s a whole lot of different disciplines that are required to build this technology effectively and it needed a strong governance model.”
Watch the entire presentation below to learn more:
Learn how successful companies gain a business advantage with open source software in our online, self-paced Fundamentals of Professional Open Source Management course. Download a free sample chapter now!
Why Using Open Source Software Helps Companies Stay Flexible and Innovate
Companies that use Open Source Software (OSS) find that it offers the most flexibility of any third-party software alternative. You are, for example, never locked into a vendor, their costs, their buying structures, or their re-distribution terms. Open Source enables vendor independence.
In addition, using OSS speeds development, lowers costs, and keeps companies on the cutting edge of technology by facilitating innovation. Open source communities provide a low-cost medium for incubation and testing of new capabilities. While open source ecosystems direct ownership and accountability back to the development teams.
All of this adds up to a competitive advantage for organizations that use OSS.
Previously in this series, we’ve discussed why OSS is faster and more cost effective. This time we’ll cover why open source software is also more flexible and supports innovation.
Why Is Open Source Software More Flexible?
Open Source offers the most flexibility of any third-party software alternative. Here’s why:
● Vendor independence — as mentioned above, you are never locked into a vendor.
● No contractual limits on deployment — OSS often has very liberal terms attached to it for deployment, so you have the greatest possible flexibility on platforms, numbers of users, number of processors, or any other scaling factor that could impact the price of proprietary software.
● Source code allows customization — Because you’re in possession the source code, you may also customize OSS to meet your needs. And if your customizations are of value to others, the community may support your modifications in future releases.
● Open source communities encourage and facilitate customization — making it easier to extend the solution for particular use cases or to integrate with other products.
● Ongoing collaborative community support and maintenance – healthy Open Source communities provide ongoing support and encourage input and suggestions for improvements.
How Does Open Source Software Support Innovation?
OSS was originally conceived as a way to facilitate development and innovation through collaboration. The open source approach has proven so effective for innovation, that many leading edge software technologies are driven by open source communities. For example:
● The Internet has been developed primarily as a large collection of individual, but related, open source projects.
● Software development tool innovation and integration is largely an open source domain.
● The incredible rate of innovation in the mobile communications space is only possible through OSS. Although Android is the primary example, even proprietary platforms like Apple’s iOS are largely built from open source components, like BSD Unix.
● Like the rest of the Internet, social media software has emerged from and grown through open source.
● The arena of scientific computing and massively parallel computing are almost exclusively open source domains.
Many open source communities exhibit rapid evolution that can be harnessed through participation to speed your company’s or your organization’s innovative processes. The open source ethos of bottom-up meritocracy directs ownership and accountability back to development teams. One of the best ways to introduce a new software idea, test new capabilities, and grow an active user base is through an open source community.
And finally, the innovation that open source enables is not just in the technical arena. The lack of contractual constraints in open source licensing allows for creative new uses, new distribution schemes, flexible and creative packaging and pricing approaches, and other forms of business and market innovation.
In today’s rapidly evolving markets, companies that consistently innovate, most quickly, at the least cost, will win. NOT USING open source software may place your organization at a disadvantage.
However, there are some operational challenges that companies must face when they embrace the open source development revolution. We’ll cover some of these challenges next week and then finish up the series with an overview of some of the legal risks involved with poorly managed OSS.
Read more:
Using Open Source Software to Speed Development and Gain Business Advantage
Establishing a Clean Software Baseline for Open Source License Compliance
One of a company’s first challenges when starting an open source compliance program is to find exactly which open source software is already in use and under which licenses it is available.
This initial auditing process is often described as establishing a clean compliance baseline for your product or software portfolio. This is an intensive activity over a period of time that can extend for months, depending on how soon you started the compliance activities in parallel to the development activities.
Below are some recommendations, based on The Linux Foundation’s e-book Open Source Compliance in the Enterprise, for some of the best ways to achieve initial license compliance.
4 Activities to Establish Baseline Compliance
Organizations achieve initial compliance through the following activities:
• Early submission and review of open source usage requests.
• Continuous automated source code inspection based on a predefined interval of time for all source code.
• Continual source code scans, including code received from third-party software providers, to intercept source code that was checked into the code base without a corresponding compliance ticket. Such source code scans can be scheduled to run on a monthly basis, for instance.
• Enforced design and architectural review, in addition to code inspections, to analyze the interactions between open source, proprietary code, and third party software components. Such reviews are mandatory only when a given interaction may invoke license compliance obligations.
Compliance on Future Revisions
If a company fails to establish baseline compliance, it is almost guaranteed that future revisions of the same product (or other products built using the initial baseline) will suffer from compliance issues. To guard against such scenarios, companies should consider establishing other elements of a complete open source management program, including the following:
• Offer simple but enforced policies and lightweight processes.
• Include compliance checkpoints as part of the software development process as it moves from concept into shipping
a product or software stack. Ideally, with every development milestone, you can incorporate a corresponding compliance milestone, ensuring that all software components used in the build have parallel and approved compliance tickets.
• Ensure availability of a dedicated compliance team.
• Utilize tools and automation to support efficient processing of compliance tickets.
There are several challenges in maintaining open source compliance, similar to those faced when establishing baseline compliance. In fact, many of the steps are identical, but on a smaller, incremental scale. We’ll cover recommendations for maintaining compliance in the next article in this series.
Read the other articles in this series:
The 7 Elements of an Open Source Management Program: Strategy and Process
The 7 Elements of an Open Source Management Program: Teams and Tools
How and Why to do Open Source Compliance Training at Your Company
Basic Rules to Streamline Open Source Compliance For Software Development
How to Raise Awareness of Your Company’s Open Source License Compliance
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