Christopher Ferris

Christopher (Chris) Ferris (born c. 1957) is a computer scientist, best known for co-leading the Hyperledger Fabric project where he chairs the Technical Steering Committee and is a member of the Governing Board of the foremost blockchain project of the Linux Foundation. Hyperledger 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 contributions to other technologies, including web services and cloud. Ferris is currently an IBM Fellow, and CTO Open Technologies.
History.
In 1999, Ferris was invited to work with OASIS (organization) on the problem of B2B transactions, launching his open source career development. In the early days of the internet, vendor-specific and proprietary Electronic Data Interchange 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 IT, he was invited to the first and second meetings of the OASIS (organization) working group looking into ebXML (Electronic Business Markup Language) for ERP (Enterprise Resource Management) and B2B (Business to Business) transactions, such as invoices, purchasing, payment transactions. The United Nations adopted this work as the foundational international standard around global commerce, see UN/CEFACT.
Ferris became vice chair of the OASIS working group on messaging. This work lead to SOAP replacing or underlying vendor-specific proprietary messaging systems, and led to the development of XML (eXtensible Markup Language) developed by a working group at the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). Ferris then became chair of web service architecture working group at the W3C. In fall 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, Docker.,
Linux Foundation Hyperledger.
Ferris is a member of the Hyperledger Technical Steering Committee. He is an advocate for open source code communities with commercially-friendly licenses, and open governance, such as Linux Foundation Hyperledger.
Ferris was the keynote speaker on the "State of Blockchain", at the 2017 Open Source Leadership Summit for the Linux Foundation.
Patents.
Patents that are cited more than one hundred times: