Release of PaySwarm Payment Processor (p3)

Today, Digital Bazaar is making a public statement of intent to
implement standards-track specifications that may be generated by the
Web Payments Activity at W3C[1] (which may include the implementation of
various Credentials CG specifications). We are doing this for a number
of reasons:

1. To do our part to ensure that the Web Payments Activity,
   any any subsequent Credentials work, is successful by providing half
   of the required implementations necessary to reach W3C
   Recommendation status.

2. To send a strong signal to financial and credentialing organizations
   that there will be an implementation for them to integrate into
   their systems when the technologies are ratified.

3. To be transparent about how the technology works by providing source
   code access to our implementations.

4. To help spur more R&D in this area by providing a platform for
   hobbyists and researchers to experiment with Web Payments
   and Credential technologies.

We are accomplishing the above by releasing two of our core products to
Github under a non-commercial license (free to use for
hacking/research/trial purposes).

The first is called Bedrock[1], which helps organizations build the
server-side and client-side portions of REST API-driven modern Web apps.
It has useful built-ins like user account management, strong
cryptography support, Denial-of-Service protection, identity and
credentials, digital signature support, native JSON-LD support in
MongoDB, and many other built-in features (runs on Linux, Mac OS X, and
Windows):

https://github.com/digitalbazaar/bedrock#bedrock

The second is called p3 (the PaySwarm Payment Processor), which is built
on top of Bedrock. P3 is a Web application and REST API service that can
be used to deploy Web Payments as a Service (WPaaS) for banks, financial
institutions, and individuals that want to manage their own financial
resources (there is a strong credentialing component to what we're doing
here as well):

https://github.com/digitalbazaar/p3#payswarm-payment-processor-p3

The p3 code base is the software that powers https://dev.payswarm.com/.
It implements many of the specifications that the JSON-LD CG, the Web
Payments CG, and the Credentials CG have been working on for the past
few years. From this day on, all development on these two projects will
happen via the public Github repositories.

I'd like to make it clear that these two code bases are not being
released as open source software; it's non-commercial software. While we
do release quite a bit of software as open source, the reasons we chose
to do this release under a non-commercial license can be found here:

https://github.com/digitalbazaar/bedrock/blob/master/FAQ.md#is-bedrock-open-source

There is still quite a bit of work to do on the two software projects
above, but we wanted to release the source code sooner than later so
that others may use it to perform research and play around with the
various experimental Community Group specifications. We hope this
release will be a positive contribution towards the Credentials work as
well as the Web Payments Activity. I'll stop here and respond to any
questions the group may have about this release. Thoughts?

-- manu

[1] To be clear, there currently are no standards-track specifications
related to Web Payments or Credentials yet, but based on the current
trajectory of the Web Payments Interest Group, Digital Bazaar expects
there to be a number of them over the next few years.

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: The Marathonic Dawn of Web Payments
http://manu.sporny.org/2014/dawn-of-web-payments/

Received on Monday, 19 January 2015 16:08:17 UTC