Interview with Apache Web server pioneer Brian Behlendorf, who now leads open-source development of blockchains at the Linux Foundation's Hyperledger Project
but not because they want to use digital currency. http://www.technologyreview.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
A year after IBM, JP Morgan, and others handed the Open Ledger Project to the Linux Foundation, the effort has a name — Hyperledger — and now an Apache pedigree at the top: Brian Behlendorf, who helped build the web server that still anchors much of the internet, is leading its open-source development. His arrival matters because it imports the Apache playbook of vendor-neutral, foundation-governed infrastructure into a field otherwise dominated by cryptocurrency-native projects like the Bitcoin Foundation.
First-order effects
- Enterprises evaluating distributed ledgers gain a credible non-currency option: Hyperledger offers business-grade blockchain code governed by a neutral foundation rather than tied to a token or a single vendor's stack.
- Behlendorf's hire signals to Hyperledger's corporate backers — the IBM and JP Morgan camp behind the original Open Ledger Project — that the project intends to be long-term shared infrastructure, not one company's product.
Second-order effects
- The explicit framing that firms want blockchains 'not because they want to use digital currency' forces a split in the market between token-centric foundations like the Bitcoin Foundation and enterprise-ledger consortia, pushing rivals such as the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance toward interoperability collaboration rather than pure competition.
- Vendors that had been pitching proprietary blockchain platforms face a free, foundation-governed alternative, pressuring them to differentiate on services and integration instead of licensing the core ledger.
Third-order effects
- If the Apache model holds, enterprise blockheads consolidate around foundation-hosted codebases the way web infrastructure did around Apache — a trajectory the corpus already shows extending into Hyperledger Grid for supply-chain applications built atop the shared ledger.
- The durable divide is between ledgers whose value accrues to a native token and ledgers whose value accrues to member enterprises; governance structure, not cryptography, becomes the deciding competitive variable.
The trend: Blockchain development is bifurcating into token-driven public networks and foundation-governed enterprise infrastructure, with the Apache-style governance model becoming the template for the latter.