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Minimalist, Modular and Empowering

Member companies of Xalgorithms Alliance are pleased to introduce several thoughtful free/libre/open contributions to efficient commerce:

1. The Xalgorithms Federated Registry of Rules can drive down the cost and complexity of rules automation by an order of magnitude. This would dramatically improve the operational performance of loyalty programs, formula-based pricing, transaction taxes/exemption/credits and cross-border duties, amongst other factors.

2. The Lichen component, used together with the Xalgorithms Federated Registry, would expand the ability of buyers and sellers to configure their transactions, using whatever commerce and payment solutions they prefer.

3. Lichen can also provide a new way to generate high-quality, standards-based, privacy-protected open data for both immediate and trend analytics. We’re creating a new, accessible data source that anyone can utilize to understand markets more fully.

Stakeholders in any market transaction (buyer, seller, government) will each be able to exercise their lawful prerogatives at the time of purchase more autonomously, completely and accurately than is otherwise feasible.

First alpha release date for Lichen Xalgorithms: 25 February, 2016.

Inter-Jurisdictional & Omnichannel & Multi-Solution Harmonization

Lichen Xalgorithms is being designed from the beginning in alignment with specifications provided in core global standards for e-commerce, such as:

As it implements global standards and aligns with global principles, Lichen Xalgorithms is positioned to simplify business across international-national-state/provincial-municipal jurisdictions; all of it via mobile, web, point-of-sale and other channels, using any commerce environment and payment method. Standards help to eliminate distortions that constrict genuine market trade amongst buyers and sellers.

Ubiquitous Deployment + Competitive Adaptation via Dual Licensing

So as to make the Lichen component readily adaptable to any e-commerce solution, it is being provided with two distribution streams from the outset:

This dual licensing scheme for the Lichen project creates the following competitive scenario:

  • Developers can implement and produce derivative works from OpenLichen inside any restricted source-code component or solution, as well as within any free/libre component (e.g. FreeLichen) or solution.  This enables ubiquitous deployment along with adaptation in a highly competitive business landscape.
    • Developers who want to restrict competitor access to advanced features that they may add to OpenLichen can do so under any license whatsoever.
    • Developers who want to ensure community access to advanced features that they may add to OpenLichen can commit those to the FreeLichen distribution.
  • Developers working on OpenLichen can learn from ideas and methods implemented in the FreeLichen stream, as long as those ideas end up being differently expressed through original source-code.
  • Determinations regarding the optimal allocation of functional source code to these parallel distributions will be made through Xalgorithms Alliance members and the developer community.

Xalgorithms? Lichen?

An algorithm is a set of steps that a computer can run to solve a problem. Xalgorithms (“ex-algorithms”) refers to external extensible algorithms. Lichen is named after the diverse and colorful family of symbiotic living things that attach to the surfaces of other objects. This sums up how these software components can be deployed.

Free-Lichen

Open-lichen

Xalgorithms