HN user
Where I said above that people need to do research, it wasn't necessarily directed at you. Perhaps you have, though even the above statements suggest you've not looking at this the same way many others do, so we can likely just punt with we are trying to solve different problems. And at the very least, have different definitions of decentralized.
IBM is not the only company that can deliver a network built using Hyperledger Fabric, or any of the other frameworks. Did you take a look at Sawtooth, or Iroha? Did your devs engage with the actual Hyperledger community, or only through IBM? There are several healthcare companies (Change Healthcare is one, managing insurance claims) who have engaged directly and are in production.
Thank you! Folks are working hard to get deployment and management via Kube (and Helm Charts, etc) to be first-class supported and consistent. It's about where one would expect a 1.x level project to be, which means improvements like you point out are needed. Lots has happened since November. :) Hope you consider coming back and contributing.
Parties do _not_ have to trust each other to work in a permissioned or consortium block chain. They just don't. They do have to be non-anonymous to each other, and they might have to sign up to a legal agreement between each other (brokered by the governing entity convening the ledger, who issues certs to organizations so they can participate). But they don't have to be trusted. All you need is intrinsic interest in being on the ledger - some kind of pain (be it staked value, getting kicked out of a market, etc) if they are found to be a bad actor, which would be pretty obvious, and many bad actions can be prevented in the first place (e.g. prevention of double spend).
"While Hyperledger is mainly an IBM and friends like project"
IBM must have a lot of friends then, including direct competitors like Oracle and SAP, and lots of small startups. :) IBM is one of over 250 members in the consortium, but in the developer community (where it really counts), they are a substantial contributor - I have no idea how many FTEs but there are dozens of IBM developer names in the changelogs for Fabric, Composer, and others. But there are hundreds of other developers contributing to the 10 different project at Hyperledger, and even on Fabric, they are less than 50% of the contributor base by individual and by pull requests. The development is all done publicly (I challenge the "lot of decisions and information is kept inside" claim) and who you work for does not matter, so it's really on the other companies in this space (large and small) to increase their contribution levels, not on IBM's shoulders to decrease theirs, if this is an important metric.
"in practice there is not a real alternative to proof of work"
Come back when you've learned something about how blockchains work somewhere other than with cryptocurrencies. There are many other effective consensus mechanisms out there, especially when you're not trying to solve the anonymous participation goal - and much more energy efficient, and with better speed and finality to boot.
"crypto economic incentive is what makes a Blockchain a blockchain"
No. Perhaps this is a semantics game, as lots of people pretend to be authoritative about this, but there are plenty of intrinsic motivations to developing a common system of record amongst a population of rivalrous nodes, even amongst parties who don't trust each other. If ten banks want to maintain a shared DLT to exchange bank wires, they don't need to pay each other a token to record a transaction. They just don't - the costs of running such an infrastructure are de minimus compared to all the other costs in adoption.
"The underlying philosophy of hyperledger is around federated networks"
False. Hyperledger, as a project and as a community, is a place for the collaborative software development around open source blockchain technologies. There are five different frameworks, including Fabric, but including others focused on different approaches. All projects have focused on non-POW consensus mechanisms, and most are an implementation of consortium models, what's sometimes called "permissioned" blockchains - pick your metaphor, but a consortium of entities governed by a lightweight governing mechanism, or be it a referee on a football field, is a much closer conceptual model than a "federated" network, for which there are already plenty of options.
Again, please do research, talk to people, if you have questions or concerns air them with the project, but please don't just spout what you've heard, or made up after you saw the announcement press release in December of 2015 and paid no further attention to.
It could be changed to "The Linux Foundation's approach", sure, but it's very much a Linux Foundation project, and is developed and managed using the same template by which the Foundation manages the kernel project and others. We have some differences - there is no central kernel, but a family of different DLT systems within the Hyperledger community, reflecting geniunely different approaches. But other parts are similar, from technical governance to everything being under an open source license to legal compliance.
There is a lot of misinformation circulating in the comments here that I'll be addressing as replies to some of these threads, though inevitably won't be able to get to each one. I'd ask each of you to not just repeat misinformation you've heard from others, but do first-hand research by going to the Hyperledger website, wiki, discussion forums, or other places and learn about the tech before taking the snarky way out. Thanks,
Brian Behlendorf, Exec Director, Hyperledger