What Linux was to the Web hasn’t been emulated yet in the blockchain. This is perhaps the reason why blockchain hasn’t yet taken off on a commercial or business level. Knowing this, there isn’t much I can do to resist thinking back to what Linux did to become successful and propose the same approach with blockchain.

Linux’s Success

Linux owes its success to the open-source GNU project. GNU produced the tools, compilers, debuggers, and shell implementations necessary to build a Unix-like operating system. Linux glued all sorts of technologies, developer tools, and software development kits together to create the most pragmatic technology platform in the world.

There are perhaps a number of main reasons why Linux was so successful.

Linux was open-source end-to-end

One of the main reasons for Linux’s success was that Linus Torvalds made the Linux software free and open-source. At the same time, he also made sure that the licensing model was business friendly. Torvalds originally released Linux under a license that simply prevented its commercial use. Though being the genius and pragmatist he is, he later switched to the GNU General Public License which protects the openness of source code but allows complementary business-friendly licensing to co-exist, like BSD and Apache to allow for commercial use.

Many early Unix operating systems developers built variants of were more freely shared than those restricted by expensive commercial IT vendor licenses. However, they weren’t ideological about what the commercial purpose of the projects was. On the other hand, those that were ideological about commercial use were not decentralized in terms of code sharing.

A large and highly skilled community of free software developers followed Torvalds and his specific dual approach. A great product was built with a clear vision of its purpose. As a result, early adopters came rushing in. Businesses who brought in the masses followed these early adopters. The rest is history.

Linux’s development was decentralized, yet maintained

Linux had a true resonance to open-source and became a hot topic among developers. A seminal essay by renowned developer Eric Raymond, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” and related works made the case that software develops best when a large number of contributors collaborate continuously within a relatively decentralized organizational structure. That has indeed proven to be the case with Linux. Developers are what make technology, and attracting them requires practicing open-source as a way of life. Just listen to Steve Ballmer describe what it takes for technology to become successful if you still aren’t convinced.

Incumbent IT vendors like IBM took a centralized approach to Linux development and as a result, failed to build an alternative complete Linux operating system to compete with vendors like Red Hat and SuSE. The same perhaps goes for current IT vendor dominated consortia trying to implement private blockchain systems for specific industries. This centralized development approach will likely not succeed in the face of decentralized development with thousands of smart minds shaping the future of blockchain software.

However, a decentralized approach is not the only thing needed to succeed. Linux succeeded because Linus Torvalds assumed a figurehead and leadership role in the resulting Linux codebase development. He chose which contributions to include or reject. Linus was the core maintainer of the platform; which coupled with its decentralized development, is an approach that made Linux successful.

Linux took a pragmatic approach to execution

The core architects of Linux didn’t spend all their time on R&D and academic papers; they didn’t spend all their time trying to use the best or the sexiest technology. Many proposed competing systems to Linux followed the former approach, and in the end, did not succeed. They became research projects rather than practical or commercial implementations. They should have focused on leveraging existing proven technologies and techniques, but instead, concentrated on indefinite research and testing.

Linux was supported by firms with customer know-how that relentlessly drove adoption of the technology

The rise of Linux systems as a result of Linus Torvalds’ pragmatism in licensing the Linux software with complementary business-friendly license models led to the emergence of a new breed of enterprise IT support firms. One of these firms was Red Hat, who built their products entirely on open-source technology. To this day, they follow the same strict open-source mantra and methodology when conducting business that they did over twenty years ago. Red Hat currently nets $2.9B in revenue per year and is a global leader in providing Linux solutions to enterprises.

Red Hat began life as a software and consulting company in 1994 selling its product (known as a ‘Linux distribution’) called Red Hat Linux. A few years later, and just under 20 years ago, Red Hat went public. The firm reached an immediate valuation of USD 3,000,000,000. This gave them the currency to grow by building out technical and business teams around the world. It also enabled them to acquire leading-edge open-source firms like Cygnus (caretaker for the GNU compiler) to get control of critical complementary technologies and open-source developers and to allow them to invest in finding and nurturing early lighthouse customer reference cases. Being part of the executive team at Cygnus, I subsequently became global head of internet appliances at Red Hat and ran its early stage embedded Linux (aka IoT) unit.

Red Hat’s stock exchange listing got them noticed by global incumbent IT vendors, namely IBM. IBM’s then-CEO Louis Gerstner sent a team to Red Hat’s HQ in North Carolina to learn more about this new open-source Linux phenomenon. A few months later: when asked by Red Hat to be added to the IBM price list so customers who wanted this could buy support for it, IBM initially refused. When Red Hat later asked for its assistance in its efforts to build an IBM mainframe version of Red Hat Linux for interested clients — they also refused. Many clients today run Red Hat Linux on IBM’s mainframe systems, despite IBM having its in-house version of Linux to sell and support.

Today, Red Hat is the global leader of Linux for enterprise business customers. They deliver great technology, provide expert enterprise support, and continue to innovate its technology. Red Hat’s model was a formula for success. Red Hat began as a Linux company that later became a 24/7/365 technical support and software vendor for its Linux distribution. Red Hat leveraged its technical know-how built around its open-source model, which is its key differentiator. When combined with its innate customer understanding, this resonated with customers and allowed it to stand out from the IT incumbents of the time like IBM who didn’t understand open-source.

Red Hat has achieved incredible success (USD 23,000,000,000 market cap as of writing), and Linux has penetrated most of the worlds IT systems. This can all tell us a lot about what it takes to make a new open-source technology successful. Let’s look at how we could apply that to the next significant open-source movement: blockchain.

Just as Eric Raymond’s essay shaped ideologies of open-source — Satoshi Nakamoto‘s whitepaper of 2008 explains the virtues of a public distributed network which developed doctrines regarding trust. A new industry formed around blockchain after Nakamoto’s whitepaper. It has been increasing in size ever since.

In January of this year, I was offered a leadership position at another IT services-focused startup. In many ways, that moment felt similar to how it felt when I took on my first position at Red Hat. Back then I was with a new, up and coming contender in the open-source IT software and services space with significant customer interest. This time, I was joining a new blockchain IT company that has one of the highest numbers of commercial deployments in the industry.

This company wanted to develop an innovative distributed ledger to present to some of the most significant early adopter blockchain clients across the world. I met the team following the offer and was asked to lead their open-source strategy. I agreed to join them. They were a group of brilliant database engineers based in Korea.

When we met, there were no hyperbola or infeasible visions of changing the world or making all data secure forever using an ERC-20 smart contract. There were only focused talks of building solutions for customers and emulating successful open-source business models.

It was an easy decision because I instantly knew what had to be done. I also felt I had something to add that may help them. I understood all of the foundational open-source practices, methods, and best business practices for an IT company to drive enterprise adoption of open-source technology. I’ve seen this same narrative play out over the thirty years that I’ve been in IT. I understand how to package and explain technology, then deliver it to clients.

I plan to use all of these things that I have learned, and my open-source experience in a new project that I am fully focused on and am enjoying every minute of. This project is Aergo. Aergo will emulate all of Linux’s open-source models and will have an existing global enterprise-IT consulting firm with prior experience in delivering commercial blockchain implementations to drive adoption of it.

Aergo’s Approach

Just as Red Hat was involved in Linux software and used consulting services before it gained commercial scale to become the go-to technical support company for the technology; a relatively unknown company from South Korea, Blocko, has been delivering private blockchain implementations to large clients around the world for the past four years and will become the go-to technical support company for the Aergo technology.

The team comprises of over 50 senior developers that know how to develop, test, and package commercial-scale blockchain solutions together. The team here has an innate customer focus and deep technical understanding of blockchain technology. This is very similar to Red Hat in the early days before it became a global player in the technology space.

Aergo is a new platform that is initially being developed and supported by Blocko not only around a core set of open-source technologies; but as an entire open-source platform and supporting ecosystem. Aergo is a blockchain platform that enables businesses to achieve distributed trust at scale. Aergo follows the key principles of open-source development; open-source software licensing; decentralized development approach; pragmatic leadership; and support for developers, integrators, and businesses.

Aergo is open-source end-to-end

Aergo has established itself as an open-source and not-for-profit organization. It’s a form of an open-source foundation that will adopt, follow, and adapt to the same open-source platform model proven to be successful with Linux. The licensing model Aergo is adopting is a so-called dual licensing developer and business-friendly licensing approach. This allows us to keep the software open-source to benefit from developer interaction and follow the associated methodology, while also allowing businesses to commercialize the technology to support their end customers.

Aergo follows a decentralized development approach led by Blocko

A decentralized development approach is necessary to maximize the potential of a technology. Aergo will release its technology through well-established open-source platforms like GitHub. Developers will be able to inspect, criticize, correct, and enhance the base-layer Aergo protocol and all of the IT services we ship with it.

Not only that, but some key components to Aergo will release as standalone open-source projects that anyone can use. Our highly experienced strategic development partner Blocko helps our foundation to direct and focus key efforts to make sure that dApp developers, technology partners, and our future customers can adopt and use the platform in real-world enterprise deployments. Aergo has hired many leading open-source experts who helped customers not only adopt open-source but they often were the ones who wrote the underlying code used.

Aergo takes a pragmatic approach to execution

There were significant technical differences between Linux and other competing systems that were also trying to get a foothold to replace Unix in business over the past 20 years. Most of them failed. Part of the reason for this was that many of these alternatives were somewhat more research projects than practical implementations.

What is needed isn’t merely a more scalable architecture or higher throughput capabilities. What’s needed is a focused and expert team that is pragmatic, just like the Linux Foundation was; to carefully develop and package the blockchain as well as key associated technologies together in the right way.

There are hundreds of companies and institutions putting research into new consensus protocols, database implementations, and tokenomics designs to create a Utopian public chain that can scale. Looking back, this is very similar to how most Unix-like system projects indulged in lengthy research operations and waited to commence development. The Linux project moved ahead by compiling and redesigning the best of what techniques were available then; adding new technologies along the way; and then packaging them together. It was a massive success. At the time, many developers resented Linus Torvalds’ pragmatic approach. They may have been technically correct and genuine in their criticisms, but they would have significantly slowed down the adoption of the technology. The technology may have even turned out to be better, but it surely would not have turned out to be so successful.

There are many research papers and white papers on blockchain out there. The question is, where are the enterprise customer-focused in-production deployments?

Aergo is very different from other blockchains projects. It uses the best of existing blockchain technologies; the best of enterprise software development methods; the best and most cost-effective techniques for secure serverless cloud delivery; and finally it uses best practices proven to work in full-scale enterprise deployments with clients around the world.

What the market needs is not more research. What the market needs delivery made with aggression.

Blocko is actively using its customer know-how to drive adoption of Aergo

Aergo aims to deliver on all of the above by combining each element and using over four years worth of in-production private blockchain know-how from the company backing the project, Blocko.

Just as Red Hat began selling Linux services and distributions before scaling to become a global operation and leader in Linux deployments; Blocko has delivered blockchain implementations and services to over 23 enterprise clients in South Korea with over 25 million endpoints before it began with Aergo. These are not white papers or proof of concepts. These are real enterprise deployments with real customers; secure, maintainable systems designed locally and scaled out globally.

Blocko is not only taking four years of practical blockchain, cloud, and IT development know-how and building the platform as well as the foundation behind it; it is also working very hard to make the platform easy to use. The non-profit organization behind Aergo is comprised mainly of existing Blocko team members — dedicating their time and expertise to make the platform’s open-source vision a reality.

Just as Red Hat established global business development branches to establish reference customers globally; Blocko is putting together similar local teams that can help clients quickly discover and implement blockchain in their IT ecosystems. This will give the company the leverage needed to drive serious adoption of Aergo and finally trump software services incumbents like IBM in terms of blockchain services.

The company is slowly building out the team to deliver these local services with offices in Seoul, London, Germany, Brazil, and Canada. I am actively hiring many of the open-source gurus that I’ve worked with over the past twenty years and bringing them on board to provide the same valuable skill-set they provided in driving adoption of Linux at Red Hat — but now to blockchain at Blocko. We’ll continue to add to this team and are actively looking for more skilled open-source and blockchain developers and ambassadors to join our cause. An ambitious mission like this takes time and people. More than ever before, it really is about the team.

Blocko’s research and development team, Bundang office, Seoul, Korea.

Blocko will release advanced developer-friendly software development kits; stable and well-documented application programming interfaces; as well as easy to follow and adopt deployment blueprints. These blueprints will use software code, smart contracts and example implementations developed for real-life, large-scale commercial deployments by our partner Blocko over that past four years. We intend to make them available to users of the Aergo public network to design, deploy, and manage blockchain systems based on proven use-cases modeled by Blocko. These will allow developers, technology partners, and customers to build robust blockchain systems in a matter of weeks rather than months — while learning everything they need to learn in the process of doing it themselves in that same amount of time. Aergo is a sophisticated platform made easy.

Linux and other such innovative technologies were adopted by leading early-stage clients over the past 20 years with the help of experts; experts who previously worked at Red Hat, SuSE, VMware, and Deutsche Telekom; experts who have built secure and scalable systems serving millions of business customers around the world and across many industries.

I believe the same narrative will play out with enterprise blockchain. Experts from Blocko who have built systems for large enterprises — such as Samsung SDS, Hyundai Motors, Lotte Card, Shinhan Bank, the Korean Stock Exchange, and others now actively work on Aergo. Just as Linux became the foundation of the computing world, blockchain-based platforms like Aergo could perhaps become the foundation of what many are now calling Web 3.0.

I’m excited to work with the Blocko team in building out the Aergo platform. We hope this article gives an insight into the very differentiating philosophies behind Aergo and why this isn’t just another project. This is something much more, and much grander than many may realize.

Oh, and we won’t be joining any so-called large IT vendor-focused consortium or ask anyone to add our solution to their price list anytime soon. The IT suppliers of yesterday can do that.

We will simply focus all our efforts on building the tech, attracting great developers and partners, and working with customers. We focus on customers who want to build great new products and services with the scale and reach to achieve massive network effects without having to trust their data to a middleman.