Ripples owners, OpenCoin, have announced that they will make the payment system available on an open source license beginning September 26.
The payment platform also has its own currency, some 100 billion of which have been mined in advance. But the parent company’s choice to keep Ripple closed sourced until now has been met with controversy.
OpenCoin’s founders have said all along that they were planning to open source Ripple. CTO Stefan Thomas said there were some issues that had to be fixed before open sourcing, otherwise Ripple “would have likely sustained significant network downtime.”
The biggest boon from all this will be the software that runs the servers that support Ripple gateways. This software is called rippled, and its closed sourcing all this time was the biggest point of contention.
After September 26, anyone interested will be able to download the source from GitHub.
Thomas said the next phase of growth requires a “developer community who can carry on the development, a network of validators … who continue operating nodes, and most importantly, a vibrant economy that is using the network to process transactions.
OpenCoin plans to present the fully open source Ripple at its first developer conference in Las Vegas on October 10. That conference, Money 2020, will explore emerging payment processing services and emerging financial services. A full description of Ripple’s inner workings is expected.
Open sourcing the code is seen as a key to spurring the adoption and integration of Ripple, particularly among merchants who are only now just getting introduced to Bitcoin. At the moment, Ripple gateways include SnapSwap, Ripple China, Justcoin and Bitstamp.
As part of the announcement, OpenCoin Inc. has said it will change its name to Ripple Labs Inc. simply to make the company’s name more self-explanatory, according to Thomas.