The Hyperledger Technical Steering Comittee (TSC) voted last week to move Hyperledger Fabric from incubation to active status.
The group sees Hyperledger as an “umbrella” for software developer communities building open source Blockchain and related technologies. Fabric falls under that umbrella and is the first of the five Incubator projects to graduate. While Hyperledger Fabric has not yet reached its v1.0 release, the TSC members unanimously agreed that the project has satisfied all of the Incubation Exit Criteria.
The exit criteria by which projects are evaluated in order to graduate from Incubation include legal compliance, community support, test coverage and continuous integration support, documentation, architectural alignment, published releases, and infrastructure support for such things as requirements and defect tracking, code reviews, continuous integration testing and more.
One of the most important of these criteria is the community support criteria. The most successful and sustainable open source projects grow out of a diverse community of contributors, where the loss of any one individual or company can be compensated by the community as a whole. Hyperledger, The TSC members agreed, that Fabric had made significant progress towards that diversity goal, and given the trajectory, agreed that the criteria was satisfied.
IBM contributed the codebase that, in part, became the basis of the Hyperledger Fabric Incubator. In the year since the project entered incubation, the diversity of contributors on Fabric-related projects has grown from nearly no diversity of contributors to 45 per cent of the contributors – representing individual contributors or developers working for one of nineteen other companies, be they exchanges, banks, large ISVs or start-ups. The project’s 10 maintainers – those individuals tasked with leading the project’s development – represent three different companies and two individual contributors. Hyperledger Fabric has also grown in terms of sub-projects contributed by other community members such as London Stock Exchange, DTCC, Fujitsu, and others.
Hyperledger Fabric has published two releases, the latest of which was their v0.6 release in the fall of 2016. The team is working on finalizing the development of the v1.0-alpha release, which they hope to publish this month.
This is a huge step for the Hyperledger community. The graduation of Fabric represents a milestone for the Hyperledger community as a whole. Developers can join via github, Rocket.Chat the wiki or the mailing lists. You can also follow Hyperledger on Twitter or email us with any questions: [email protected].
