Christopher (Chris) Ferris (born c. 1957) is a

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

, best known for co-leading the

Hyperledger Hyperledger (or the Hyperledger Project) is an umbrella project of open source blockchains and related tools that the Linux Foundation started in December 2015. IBM, Intel, and SAP Ariba have contributed to support the collaborative development ...

Fabric project where he chaired the Technical Steering Committee from 2016 to 2018 and was a member of the Governing Board of the foremost

blockchain The blockchain is a distributed ledger with growing lists of Record (computer science), records (''blocks'') that are securely linked together via Cryptographic hash function, cryptographic hashes. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of th ...

project of the

Linux Foundation The Linux Foundation (LF) is a non-profit organization established in 2000 to support Linux development and open-source software projects. Background The Linux Foundation started as Open Source Development Labs in 2000 to standardize and prom ...

has been one of the fastest-growing open community projects, with over 200 corporate and associate members. Ferris has a history of

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is Software, computer software that is released under a Open-source license, license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and Software distribution, distribute the software an ...

contributions to other technologies, including

web services A web service (WS) is either: * a service offered by an electronic device to another electronic device, communicating with each other via the Internet, or * a server running on a computer device, listening for requests at a particular port over a n ...

and

cloud In meteorology, a cloud is an aerosol consisting of a visible mass of miniature liquid droplets, frozen crystals, or other particles, suspended in the atmosphere of a planetary body or similar space. Water or various other chemicals may ...

. Ferris is currently an IBM Fellow, and CTO Open Technologies.

History

In 1999, Ferris was invited to work with

OASIS (organization) The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS; ) is an Trade association, industry consortium that develops Technical standard, technical standards for information technology. History OASIS was founded under ...

on the problem of B2B transactions, launching his open-source career development. In the early days of the

internet The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...

, vendor-specific and proprietary

Electronic Data Interchange Electronic data interchange (EDI) is the concept of businesses electronically communicating information that was traditionally communicated on paper, such as purchase orders, advance ship notices, and invoices. Technical standards for EDI exist to ...

or EDI systems were proving “clunky” (slow to deploy and hard to maintain), and needed to be revised and opened up to encourage much faster adoption rates. As a Chief Architect of

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

IT, he was invited to the first and second meetings of the

working group looking into

ebXML Electronic Business using eXtensible Markup Language, commonly known as e-business XML, or ebXML (pronounced ee-bee-ex-em-el, 'bi,eks,em'el as it is typically referred to, is a family of XML based standards sponsored by OASIS and UN/CEFACT whose ...

(Electronic Business Markup Language) for ERP (Enterprise Resource Management) and B2B (Business to Business) transactions, such as invoices, purchasing, payment transactions. The

United Nations The United Nations (UN) is the Earth, global intergovernmental organization established by the signing of the Charter of the United Nations, UN Charter on 26 June 1945 with the stated purpose of maintaining international peace and internationa ...

adopted this work as the foundational international standard around global commerce, see

UN/CEFACT UN/CEFACT is the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business. It was established as an intergovernmental body of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) in 1996 and evolved from UNECE's long tradition of w ...

. Ferris became vice chair of the OASIS working group on

messaging A message is a unit of communication that conveys information from a sender to a receiver. It can be transmitted through various forms, such as spoken or written words, signals, or electronic data, and can range from simple instructions to co ...

. This work lead to

SOAP Soap is a salt (chemistry), salt of a fatty acid (sometimes other carboxylic acids) used for cleaning and lubricating products as well as other applications. In a domestic setting, soaps, specifically "toilet soaps", are surfactants usually u ...

replacing or underlying vendor-specific proprietary messaging systems, and led to the development of

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...

(eXtensible Markup Language) developed by a working group at the

W3C The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working together in ...

(World Wide Web Consortium). Ferris then became chair of

web service A web service (WS) is either: * a service offered by an electronic device to another electronic device, communicating with each other via the Internet, or * a server running on a computer device, listening for requests at a particular port over a n ...

architecture working group at the W3C. In the fall of 2002, Ferris joined IBM, and later became an IBM Distinguished Engineer. Ferris has also provided technical oversight and leadership in OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, Cloud Native Compute Foundation, Open Container Initiative, Mesos and Docker.,

Linux Foundation Hyperledger

Ferris was a member of the

Technical Steering Committee. He is an advocate for open source code communities with commercially-friendly licenses, and open governance, such as

. Ferris was the keynote speaker on the "State of Blockchain", at the 2017 Open Source Leadership Summit Linux Foundation (2017), “Open Source Leadership Summit”, url=https://osleadershipsummit2017.sched.com/ for the

Publications

Androulaki E, Barger A, Bortnikov V, Cachin C, Christidis K, De Caro A, Enyeart D, Ferris C, Laventman G, Manevich Y, Muralidharan S. (2018), "Hyperledger Fabric: A Distributed Operating System for Permissioned Blockchains. arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.10228. 2018 Jan 30."

* ttps://www.w3.org/2007/01/wos-papers/ibm Christopher Ferris, Kelvin Lawrence, Tony Storey (2007), “IBM Submission for the W3C Workshop on Web of Services for Enterprise Computing”
Christopher Ferris, Joel A. Farrell (2003), What are Web services? Commun. ACM 46(6): 31

Gupta A, Ferris C, Wilson Y, Venkatasubramanian K. Implementing Java computing: Sun on architecture and applications deployment. IEEE Internet Computing. 1998 Mar;2(2):60-4.

Patents

Patents that are cited more than one hundred times:
Gupta A, Ferris C, Abdelnur A, inventors; Sun Microsystems Inc, assignee. Method and apparatus for authenticating users. United States patent US 6,226,752. 2001 May 1.

Wood DL, Weschler P, Norton D, Ferris C, Wilson Y, Soley WR, inventors; Sun Microsystems Inc, assignee. Log-on service providing credential level change without loss of session continuity. United States patent US 6,609,198. 2003 Aug 19.

Wood DL, Norton D, Weschler P, Ferris C, Wilson Y, inventors; Sun Microsystems Inc, assignee. Single sign-on framework with trust-level mapping to authentication requirements. United States patent US 6,892,307. 2005 May 10.

Wood DL, Weschler P, Norton D, Ferris C, Wilson Y, Soley WR, inventors; Sun Microsystems Inc, assignee. Log-on service providing credential level change without loss of session continuity. United States patent US 6,944,761. 2005 Sep 13.

Abdelnur AH, Ferris C, inventors; Sun Microsystems Inc, assignee. User interface component. United States patent US 6,429,882. 2002 Aug 6.

References

External links

Ferris
on

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