Arnaud Le Hors, Senior Technical Staff Member of Web & Blockchain Open Technologies at IBM, speaks about blockchain and the role of open source software at Money20/20, Europe 2017.
Open source is a term denoting that a product includes permission to use its source code, design documents, or content. It most commonly refers to the open-source model, in which open-source software or other products are released under an open-source license as part of the open-source-software movement. Use of the term originated with software, but has expanded beyond the software sector to cover other open content and forms of open collaboration.
Le Hors notes that open source provides a richer community, with more input from many backgrounds, knowledge and experience.
It’s important from a security perspective to have many eyes viewing the technology to ensure bugs are found and remedied.
As a network, blockchain benefits from many developers.
Additionally, open source gives those who inspect the code confidence that it can perform as intended.
IBM decided to create an open blockchain and looked for partners. They were comfortable with the Linux Foundation and decided to create the Hyperledger project under them by contributing code, but there are other good projects, as well. The growth of members has been tremendous.