- From: Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>
- Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 11:07:53 -0500
- To: Credentials Community Group <public-credentials@w3.org>
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