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When the board of directors of Hyperledger has approved a new one Supply chain project at the beginning of this month, marked a significant departure for the open source blockchain consortium.
The sawtooth supply chain, as the project is provisionally called, opens up new horizons because it is presumably the first of the consortium to actually inhabit the level of application of the software stack. It is built on the Sawtooth framework, which Intel has contributed to Hyperledger.
Prior to this, Hyperledger limited his work to the lower layers and avoided the custom design of the blockchain application code in mind for industry players. That job was left to suppliers to perform in a proprietary manner – as IBM has done in its supply chain platform now live for food-tracking with the likes of Walmart.
Nevertheless, nine of the 11 members of the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) voted in favor of the new project on 6 December. The approval of the Sawtooth distribution chain as a high-level project greatly increases its profile and means that it enters the formal life cycle of the Hyperledger project and receives the support that goes along with that (community outreach, marketing , security review, etc.).
This was due to the objections of the other two TSC members, who questioned whether the project belonged to Hyperledger, learned CoinDesk. In particular, both work at IBM: Arnaud Le Hors, who was absent from the voteand Chris Ferris, the former president of the TSC, who was present but abstained.
At the edge of the corporate blockchain world, a tug-o-war seems to have exploded, with IBM and its preferred Hyperledger implementation known as Fabric, on the one hand, and Sawtooth supported by Intel from the other. This last team also has a budding champion in the form of a newly appointed TSC chair, and Sawtooth's chief maintainer, Dan Middleton of Intel.
In addition to engineering later in the application-level stack, Sawtooth Supply Chain is the first project sponsored by a non-technological company, the US food giant, Cargill. As such, the supply chain project, which has yet to have a definitive name, will probably accelerate towards a faster implementation than its Hyperledger peers. And given the involvement of Cargill, it is a potential rival of the IBM Food Trust.
However, The stakes are higher than potential competition between supply chain-focused platforms coming out of Hyperledger, as tensions point to bigger questions about governance.
While IBM claims that putting Hyperledger's imprimatur on an app-level project could undermine the consortium's position as a neutral player, others have characterized the resistance of the technology giant to the proposal as an attempt to stifle competition.
"This is basically a discussion of what open source software is," said James Mitchell, CEO of Bitwise, who wrote most of the Sawtooth 1.0 code and is contributing to the supply chain project. "And the structure of an organization like Hyperledger is eventually protectionist around a range of business interests or does it have a range of different objectives?"
& # 39; Pay rent & # 39;
One way to look at the strains on the supply chain project is as a sign of Hyperledger that has surpassed its origins as an organization dominated by IBM.
Choosing his words carefully, TSC Middleton's chair He told CoinDesk that part of his job is to ensure the diversity within Hyperledger and preserve those strengths from which the blockchain gets its pre-eminence.
He acknowledged that IBM made a great contribution to Hyperledger and the open source effort, as did Intel and many other organizations.
"I think it's important that none of these organizations jeopardize the legitimacy of having an open source organization where we're all developing code transparently, we just want to make sure we have a good balance between all contributors," he said. Middleton.
Bitwise's Mitchell was less diplomatic, arguing that IBM, with its early proliferation of Fabric, he used Hyperledger (and the affiliation of the consortium with the Linux Foundation) as a way to market its services to businesses – what he called "open source washing".
"You want to be able to tell a story about how you are building open source solutions, but where it is important, which is most of the code of application, you want to be able to maintain ownership of intellectual property and be able to monetize the solution at that level, "said Mitchell of IBM's blockchain strategy to date.
"I think people are aware of this, they realize they do not want to pay rent to a large technology provider for the next two decades on these solutions," he added.
Michell warned that blockchain may be an even more aggressive form of lock-in than previous corporate software licenses, once an industry adopts a particular lingua franca of how business is negotiated.
"Based on the conversations we have had with industrial partners we are working with, such as Cargill and others, we firmly believe that industry must have these solutions" rather than suppliers, Mitchell said.
This could take the form of shared and closed-source ownership among those parties, he said, or better still, open source software that those industries are building, contributing and sharing.
Real or manufactured?
In expressing his concerns about the expansion of the Hyperledger application to promote Sawtooth's supply chain project, IBM Ferris said this was his personal opinion and not a related issue. to & # 39; IBM.
He told CoinDesk:
"When we initially set up Hyperledger, we said we would not go into the application space, and we did it for a reason, because we want people to take the structures we are building and leverage them in. We did not want to be perceived in some way as a competition for someone who is legitimately trying to build a solution around the supply chain ".
Ferris added that the components built into the new supply chain project are "quite specific" for Sawtooth at this time. This worried him because, according to the leadership of Hyperledger's board of directors, higher-level tool projects must be seen to support multiple frameworks rather than being overly focused on one.
Rather than being elevated to a higher level project, the sawtooth supply chain, in his opinion, should have been placed in Hyperledger Labs. This is where projects considered too early for the approval of the TSC for incubation, such as the hackathon sample code or research projects, are placed. If a Labs project wants to enter incubation and become a formal project, a project proposal must be submitted for consideration by TSC.
With regard to Middleton's point about the need for greater diversity within Hyperledger, Ferris said that this was addressed, particularly in the last year or so, as many developers from a range of organizations have joined to the community. IBM now accounts for perhaps 30 percent of total contributions, he said.
"In Fabric, we're about 40 percent of the total, I mean, it's 100 percent, so the number is constantly falling in. Yes, IBM is very committed to the success of Hyperledger, but for the same reason, we're also trying not to be overbearing in this investment, "said Ferris.
Gari Singh, a distinguished engineer and CTO blockchain at IBM, added that while it may be flattering to know how much IBM has done with Fabric, the lack of contributions from other big players in the industry is frustrating.
"So you look at Oracle running Fabric, and Amazon and their new managed blockchain service actually take the Fabric samples and use them, but they do not return any contributions.There are incoming contributions, but they come from start-ups – we'd really like see him from the big ones, "said Singh.
True Blue
Elsewhere at the Hyperledger Forum last week in Basel, Switzerland, some prominent members of the community took the opportunity to show their respect for IBM.
Casey Kuhlman, CEO of Monax, said the sawtooth chain project was brought under the auspices of Hyperledger and speaks for itself; despite the doubts, IBM eventually did not take the lead in the project, he said, adding that he thought Big Blue acted as a "very reasonable member of the community".
"Their actions were, in my opinion, very reasonably selfish," said Kuhlman. "Because at the end of the day we are all businesses and we are all trying to make money, we are all selfish.
The director of Hyperledger, Brian Behlendorf, said that while the evolution is taking place within the organization, attention will focus on things that can generally be applied.
"It will not just be to solve Cargill's needs for a reusable body of code or model or recipe or anything else for a large number of use cases," Behlendorf said.
Speaking of the success of the first Hyperledger Global Forum, which saw hundreds of companies from a wide range of sectors descend in Basel for four days of conferences and workshops, Behlendorf also wanted to respect the due respect of IBM, concluding,
"We would not be here if it were not for them."
Intel Middleton of Intel at the image of the Global Forum of Hyperledger through Ian Allison for CoinDesk
Editor's Note: The title of this story has been updated for clarity.
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