Open source projects, such as Linux and Java, have gained strength in mainstream businesses by serving as low-cost alternatives to commercial software. These capabilities rival those of proprietary software, thanks to support from a large developer community. Popular open source projects can also accelerate open standards, the collective building blocks for products, by serving as the common implementation. Businesses and vendors using open standards free up development and services budgets for items that offer higher value and competitive advantage.

Open source is a part of the wider open computing movement, along with open standards and open architecture. Together, these initiatives enable integration and flexibility, and benefit customers by helping them avoid vendor lock-in.

Enterprises are often required to adhere to various industry compliance and technology governance requirements, so it's important to consider the implications of open technology. While it is a well-understood fact that blockchain technology powers a business network, the issues around compliance adherence and technology governance can have an exponential impact on the cost of technology consumption, governance, and maintenance.

Community-driven open innovation brings order to the chaos by providing a guiding framework for blockchain networks around network-centric software provisioning, deployment, governance, and compliance models. Because blockchain technology powers the business network, any application defining the network that represents the business application and therefore the impact—technology adoption, costs, and complexity—is also network wide. Therefore, open community-driven technologies and open standards ought to be viewed as a vehicle to risk management and risk mitigation with linkages to a community-driven governance structure. We aim to discuss this at length with a technological focus in this chapter.