What is open source supply chain? All the answers to the questions about open source supply chain, blockchain and edge mining.

Open source chain has the following industry participants in mind:

Engineers

Senior engineers can leverage the platform to monetize accumulated knowledge and insights, critique design or even organize and manage projects, utilizing career-long experiences. Young engineers can read and learn from shared design and discussions, and partake in easier tasks such as testing or validation and accumulate credibility. Raising stars can provide IP, designs to gain recognition and fortune.

Manufacturers

OEM vendors can selectively open source IPs that’s non-critical to business. Manufacturers can leverage the platform to gain thought leadership and reputation, create
adoption and save on sales & marketing, start project with ready public IP base to avoid costly
mistake, save precious time and test out technology direction, gain validation and test from
engineering community, and getting treasure brain power. Finally, all can use smart contract to
enable impartial and efficient collaboration.

IC Suppliers

IC suppliers stand to benefit in multitude. They can leverage community power to support partners to reduce cost of technical support；leverage open source to directly market to profitable long-tail segments previous too costly to reach, leverage community’s channel to
dispense inventory at risk of obsolescence.

University

Professors and lecturers can get precious insight into industry practices and leading- edge trends. At the same time, initiate or partake in interesting product concepts, or leverage community to validate or test out theories and technical solutions. Finally, gaining access to both vendors and engineers, all while rewardings for participation.

Supply-chain and components companies

Suppliers can have access to the community for resources, information or execute smart contract collectively to reduce cost, frictions and enhance trust among supply chain participants, through public ledger, shared information, and transparent rules.

Technical service companies

Traditionally, technical service companies are challenged by costly coordination and difficulty in pricing services. Using smart contract and leveraging community, both can be address in a fair and market-oriented manner.

Consumer or Prosumer

End users can come to an understanding on product and have a fair judgement and benchmark on purchase decision. Or rewarded by providing valuable feedback.

There are endless good scenarios uncover on Open Source Chain.

Open Source as a Trend

Protection of intellectual property is a long-standing tradition. It takes effort, time and talent to create value so it’s worthwhile to ensure those invested get rewarded. However, the emergence
of information technology changed how IP is deployed, from private, selected few to many with information access and intellect.

In 1983, Richard Matthew Stallman, out of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, started GNU project with the aim to create an Unix-like operating system consists of entirely free software. Subsequently, in 1991, a creative young student out of Finland, Linus Torvalds, published Linux kernel which became the kernel for operating systems such as the Linux operating system, Android, and Chrome OS under GNU General Public License (GPL). Today, Android powers about 90% of computing device worldwide.

Businesses and engineers alike start to discover that open sourcing IP is a more viable way to maintain and evolve intellectual properties. There are numerous examples in software were previously locked up source code are made available to the community to foster adoption, better quality and lower R&D cost. Linux does not belong to anyone or any business. Not even its creator Linus Torvalds owns

Linux. However, while these open Source IP created for the public good, financial rewards for these inventors are limited. Sometimes, the very creators themselves pushed into financial hardship. In addition, open source inherently needs scale and community participants, as one or few creators’ scope of knowledge is inevitably limited.

Blockchain as a Key Building Block

Blockchain, “The Trust Machine” as the 2015 Economist article termed it, is a peer-to-peer, decentralized and distributed digital ledger that is used to record multi-party interaction so that historical records cannot be altered retroactively due to the collusion of others. In early 2017, the Harvard Business Review suggested that blockchain as a foundational technology and thus “has the potential to create new foundations for our economic and social systems.

With blockchain, the above-mentioned constraining factors can be effectively managed. Rights, creatorship and ownership can register and validate on public ledger. Subsequent development, fork, validation, or consultancy can be factually and immutably recorded on shared ledgers. New ideas can administer impartially using smart contracts as community projects. IP value can price through collective opinion, actual prior implementation or marketplace while value can transmit through token mechanism. Effectively, the ecosystem could go through a re-organization using blockchain.

Anti-Spam & Edge Mining

As always, offering rewards solicit spamming and other bad behaviors. Therefore, all actions on the Chain requires a staking “reputation” point to prevent these.

As an incentive for participation, initially Open Source Chain will provide lottery to randomly award active participants for their valuable effort, up to 600 times of average thumps-up value and publicly publish activity ranking. Top 15% will receive additional reward. Open Source
chain will also adjust rule engine to restrain unproductive behaviors to ensure fair and equitable
communal culture.

Open Source Supply Chain foundation retain 0.1% on transaction to self-sustain and pay for administrative as well as network maintenance cost. Open Source Chain will initially re-distribute 90% of retained points to participants who actively uses the Chain within 12 hours’ time frame. Finally, this mechanism does not create new points.