10 ms·

Cargill open-sources Splinter, its ‘blockchain-like’ supply chain software

108 points by adrian_mrd 6y ago

optimalsolver 6y ago
This indicates they’ve found little to no value in it.
acrooks 6y ago
Commodity firms and other businesses in the supply chain space (shipping, logistics) have a long history of trying to build platforms to simplify global trade. While a great goal, over and over again these initiatives have failed because of immense inertia in the industries and because of the fact that every single counter-party involved in a transaction must be on the platform for it to work. For a merchant to use Shopify, connected to Stripe, connected to Visa, working with me, it’s relatively “easy”. Not many people involved in the process and some of them (me) don’t have any power to control how the flow works. When Cargill ships a 100,000 MT parcel of grain to be processed, there are SO many people and organisations that touch the commodity in some form. From inspection companies like SGS, to rail lines, to customs authorities, to port representatives, to ocean transportation, to banks....the list goes on. And historically the vision has been an “all or nothing” style of platform. One day we will figure out the solution to this problem, but not anytime soon and probably not with Splinter. Four of the world’s five largest grain companies, three of the world’s five largest iron ore companies, and many more use the product that I work on (www.SEDNA.com) to manage their global supply chains, and their workflows remain to be very email-based and driven by traditional ERPs. You see this in action with businesses like Flexport who started with a very formidable vision to build a platform for third-party logistics, and ultimately had to pivot to become a very digital freight forwarder after being trapped by the traditions and slow-moving nature of the industry. In these organisations there is incredible buzz and thought around digital transformation, but many of these companies are also only recently beginning to trust cloud software. So although there is a big desire to innovate and operate on the cutting edge, so many primitives and so much of the day-to-day process keeps them lagging behind.
- LaundroMat 6y ago
  One innovation that really got adopted throughout the supply chain is the container. Agreed that it's only part of the supply chain compared to what you describe, but it was a major change that affected a very large amount of processes and businesses. The scale of things such as worldwide supply chains makes you wonder whether competition is really the right catalyst for efficiency. Cooperation and the setting of standards seems to be a better answer, but of course this leads to a whole lot of different issues.
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    The container was adopted very fast and very thoroughly throughout worldwide supply chains because it was many, many orders of magnitude better - and allowed a massive reduction in staff. No proposal for better IT integration in freight comes even close to that level of saving, mostly because the existing chaos is "good enough" and the executives are very, very old and very conservative compared to "digital natives".
    - Ericson2314 6y ago
      And sticking it to the once-fearsome longshormen's union is much more appealing to sticking to yourself and your manager retainers.
  - menzoic 6y ago
    It took collaboration to integrate the containers but not necessarily to create it. Creating requires risking resources which is incentivized by the potential monetary gain. Without that potential, it's hard to imagine competitors risking their resources. Another point about collaboration in this case is that it only happened because all parties benefited more. If you don't adopt new things that optimize operations then you'll be left behind by your competitors who are operating more efficiently and have wider support for the customers everyone is competing for.
  - Closi 6y ago
    A closer innovation for supply chain might be the concept of an ASN (although anyone who works in logistics knows how disparate different supplier portals can be...)
nerdbaggy 6y ago
Hopefully it will fix their child slavery issue in their/others chocolate industry - https://www.slavefreechocolate.org/news https://www.slavefreechocolate.org/news
- anarchop 6y ago
  Of course one would hope this platform single handedly leads to major advancements on industrialisation, permanently eradicating child labour and slavery in all industries. One would also hope that simply not buying chocolate sourced from farms that employ child labourers that should be in school (as opposed to older children that don’t need to be at school, which according to the data I can find actually represents the vast majority of child labourers in the cocoa industry) would also solve the issue. My fear is however that it’s not that simple, and we could even make things worse. For example, child labour numbers have increased in recent years, haven’t been able to find percentages over time so cannot comment on that. One could hardly say that “ethical sourcing” and marketing has proven that it’s reduced child labour given this increase.
- UShouldBWorking 6y ago
  Its not a bug, it's a feature of a messy supply chain.
zer0gravity 6y ago
Open-source is eating the world and, in some sense, the other way around too.
mikewarot 6y ago
What I would like to know is how did this come to exist in the first place? I realized Cargill is HUGE, but an open source system that supports private sub-networks?!?!?
- wpietri 6y ago
  If I were a betting person, I'd guess that somebody with social connections to Cargill (e.g., an ambitious executive) took advantage of the blockchain hype cycle to sell a pilot project to credulous executives. The copyright says "2018-2020", which fits well with the cycle: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=blockchain https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=b... I presume it's getting open-sourced now because they've given up on the idea of closed-source domination of the industry, and this is the hail mary attempt on the part of the technologists to save the project, or at least to have something good on their resumes by the time the project funding runs out.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - doodledee 6y ago
    Built to be OSS from first commit.
    - wpietri 6y ago
      Your tone seems contradictory, but I don't think that actually disproves my point. I can believe that some developers always wanted to open-source it. But that doesn't mean it would have been allowed if the business plan had actually worked.
      - doodledee 6y ago
        respect on the cynicism (for real) but i think you can prob drill down on it. was airflow a failed business plan at airbnb? react a hail mary for fb? principles/values based innovation anchored on open tech / open standards / open governance being a better path for these types of solutions. because the alternative is what? entire industries locked into commercial solutions til death do us part? sounds bad.
skywhopper 6y ago
Reading the article, it’s clear there is nothing resembling actual blockchain/cryptocurrency technology involved. The engineers have built something with the features Cargill thinks their supply chain needs, and the marketers (or the savvy product managers) are just using “blockchain-like” as a descriptor and other crypto-adjacent buzzwords to generate interest and attention. It’s probably the inevitable endpoint of all the years of blockchain hype from people who didn’t understand the system to begin with—-keep using and evolving the buzzwords and apply them to entirely different, old-fashioned, boring tech that actually addresses business needs.
wpietri 6y ago
I think it's hilarious that "blockchain-like" is how people are climbing off the hype train. I'm glad they're trying to find an exit, though, and I hope that lets software be blockchain-unlike enough that these systems aren't too weighed down with unnecessary constraints and costs. For those unfamiliar, people have been trying to solve supply-chain communication issues since the 1970s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_data_interchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_data_interchange The hard part is not technology. It's getting a zillion players to agree on how to use a technology together. To the extend that "blockchain [jazz hands]" ever mattered here, it was only the chance that the tidal wave of hype might sweep everybody in the same direction.
- fbrusch 6y ago
  Couldn't blockchains offer some new tools to tackle the problem? Imagine for instance wanting to create some incentives by distributing the value of correctly tracking an item to the actors of the supply chain, with some rule like "once the item is sold, part of the revenue gets distributed to all the actors that contributed to the tracking". Wouldn't smart contracts render this simpler to implement, since code is visible by all actors and guaranteed to be executed?
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    That’s digital signatures and business logic with more work and cost.
  - binarymax 6y ago
    Please tell me what a blockchain offers here that isn’t solved by several database tables and some business logic?
    - icegreentea2 6y ago
      I think the smart contract part of blockchain doesn't offer much value. But I think the core value proposition of blockchain to supply-chain like situations is to solve the problem of "who's version of the database do we trust", without needing to resort to escrow or other 3rd parties. It won't completely solve the problems of parties being in disagreement - lawyers will still be needed, but it might address a subset of problems.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
slater 6y ago
Don't forget, Cargill is the worst company in the world: https://stories.mightyearth.org/cargill-worst-company-in-the-world/ https://stories.mightyearth.org/cargill-worst-company-in-the...
- nitrogen 6y ago
  Fair warning: the site has a translucent overlay that takes up half the screen on mobile. Can anyone summarize?
  - slater 6y ago
    Here ya go: https://archive.vn/Zfw4P https://archive.vn/Zfw4P
  - carapace 6y ago
    FWIW they also have a PDF: https://www.mightyearth.org/wp-content/uploads/Mighty-Earth-Report-Cargill-The-Worst-Company-in-the-World-July-2019.pdf https://www.mightyearth.org/wp-content/uploads/Mighty-Earth-... Or just check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargill#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargill#Criticism
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
high_density 6y ago
github link: https://github.com/Cargill/splinter https://github.com/Cargill/splinter written in rust :D
bnkamalesh 6y ago
https://dibizglobal.com https://dibizglobal.com would be an alternative
bergstromm466 6y ago
Something that really blew my hair back is hREA (formerly Holo-REA) - which is a combination of the Resources Events Agents (REA) accounting method, together with the distributed application framework holochain. It can help us move from corporate Enterprise Resource Planning software to follow (material) resources, to Network Resource Planning software, where all resources are stewarded in the commons based on open access and mutually consenting agreements/protocols. And holochain makes it all easily evolvable and unenclosable. It's one of the most exciting projects I've come across. hREA is aimed at creating a radically inclusive supply chain system. It is fully open source and being developed here: https://github.com/holo-rea/holo-rea https://github.com/holo-rea/holo-rea This is a fun intro: http://mikorizal.org/futures.html http://mikorizal.org/futures.html

108 points by adrian_mrd 6y ago

This indicates they’ve found little to no value in it.

Commodity firms and other businesses in the supply chain space (shipping, logistics) have a long history of trying to build platforms to simplify global trade. While a great goal, over and over again these initiatives have failed because of immense inertia in the industries and because of the fact that every single counter-party involved in a transaction must be on the platform for it to work. For a merchant to use Shopify, connected to Stripe, connected to Visa, working with me, it’s relatively “easy”. Not many people involved in the process and some of them (me) don’t have any power to control how the flow works. When Cargill ships a 100,000 MT parcel of grain to be processed, there are SO many people and organisations that touch the commodity in some form. From inspection companies like SGS, to rail lines, to customs authorities, to port representatives, to ocean transportation, to banks....the list goes on. And historically the vision has been an “all or nothing” style of platform. One day we will figure out the solution to this problem, but not anytime soon and probably not with Splinter. Four of the world’s five largest grain companies, three of the world’s five largest iron ore companies, and many more use the product that I work on (www.SEDNA.com) to manage their global supply chains, and their workflows remain to be very email-based and driven by traditional ERPs. You see this in action with businesses like Flexport who started with a very formidable vision to build a platform for third-party logistics, and ultimately had to pivot to become a very digital freight forwarder after being trapped by the traditions and slow-moving nature of the industry. In these organisations there is incredible buzz and thought around digital transformation, but many of these companies are also only recently beginning to trust cloud software. So although there is a big desire to innovate and operate on the cutting edge, so many primitives and so much of the day-to-day process keeps them lagging behind.

LaundroMat 6y ago
One innovation that really got adopted throughout the supply chain is the container. Agreed that it's only part of the supply chain compared to what you describe, but it was a major change that affected a very large amount of processes and businesses. The scale of things such as worldwide supply chains makes you wonder whether competition is really the right catalyst for efficiency. Cooperation and the setting of standards seems to be a better answer, but of course this leads to a whole lot of different issues.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  The container was adopted very fast and very thoroughly throughout worldwide supply chains because it was many, many orders of magnitude better - and allowed a massive reduction in staff. No proposal for better IT integration in freight comes even close to that level of saving, mostly because the existing chaos is "good enough" and the executives are very, very old and very conservative compared to "digital natives".
  - Ericson2314 6y ago
    And sticking it to the once-fearsome longshormen's union is much more appealing to sticking to yourself and your manager retainers.
- menzoic 6y ago
  It took collaboration to integrate the containers but not necessarily to create it. Creating requires risking resources which is incentivized by the potential monetary gain. Without that potential, it's hard to imagine competitors risking their resources. Another point about collaboration in this case is that it only happened because all parties benefited more. If you don't adopt new things that optimize operations then you'll be left behind by your competitors who are operating more efficiently and have wider support for the customers everyone is competing for.
- Closi 6y ago
  A closer innovation for supply chain might be the concept of an ASN (although anyone who works in logistics knows how disparate different supplier portals can be...)

nerdbaggy 6y ago

Hopefully it will fix their child slavery issue in their/others chocolate industry - https://www.slavefreechocolate.org/news https://www.slavefreechocolate.org/news

anarchop 6y ago
Of course one would hope this platform single handedly leads to major advancements on industrialisation, permanently eradicating child labour and slavery in all industries. One would also hope that simply not buying chocolate sourced from farms that employ child labourers that should be in school (as opposed to older children that don’t need to be at school, which according to the data I can find actually represents the vast majority of child labourers in the cocoa industry) would also solve the issue. My fear is however that it’s not that simple, and we could even make things worse. For example, child labour numbers have increased in recent years, haven’t been able to find percentages over time so cannot comment on that. One could hardly say that “ethical sourcing” and marketing has proven that it’s reduced child labour given this increase.
UShouldBWorking 6y ago
Its not a bug, it's a feature of a messy supply chain.

zer0gravity 6y ago

Open-source is eating the world and, in some sense, the other way around too.

mikewarot 6y ago

What I would like to know is how did this come to exist in the first place? I realized Cargill is HUGE, but an open source system that supports private sub-networks?!?!?

wpietri 6y ago
If I were a betting person, I'd guess that somebody with social connections to Cargill (e.g., an ambitious executive) took advantage of the blockchain hype cycle to sell a pilot project to credulous executives. The copyright says "2018-2020", which fits well with the cycle: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=blockchain https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=b... I presume it's getting open-sourced now because they've given up on the idea of closed-source domination of the industry, and this is the hail mary attempt on the part of the technologists to save the project, or at least to have something good on their resumes by the time the project funding runs out.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- doodledee 6y ago
  Built to be OSS from first commit.
  - wpietri 6y ago
    Your tone seems contradictory, but I don't think that actually disproves my point. I can believe that some developers always wanted to open-source it. But that doesn't mean it would have been allowed if the business plan had actually worked.
    - doodledee 6y ago
      respect on the cynicism (for real) but i think you can prob drill down on it. was airflow a failed business plan at airbnb? react a hail mary for fb? principles/values based innovation anchored on open tech / open standards / open governance being a better path for these types of solutions. because the alternative is what? entire industries locked into commercial solutions til death do us part? sounds bad.

skywhopper 6y ago

Reading the article, it’s clear there is nothing resembling actual blockchain/cryptocurrency technology involved. The engineers have built something with the features Cargill thinks their supply chain needs, and the marketers (or the savvy product managers) are just using “blockchain-like” as a descriptor and other crypto-adjacent buzzwords to generate interest and attention. It’s probably the inevitable endpoint of all the years of blockchain hype from people who didn’t understand the system to begin with—-keep using and evolving the buzzwords and apply them to entirely different, old-fashioned, boring tech that actually addresses business needs.

wpietri 6y ago

I think it's hilarious that "blockchain-like" is how people are climbing off the hype train. I'm glad they're trying to find an exit, though, and I hope that lets software be blockchain-unlike enough that these systems aren't too weighed down with unnecessary constraints and costs. For those unfamiliar, people have been trying to solve supply-chain communication issues since the 1970s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_data_interchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_data_interchange The hard part is not technology. It's getting a zillion players to agree on how to use a technology together. To the extend that "blockchain [jazz hands]" ever mattered here, it was only the chance that the tidal wave of hype might sweep everybody in the same direction.

fbrusch 6y ago
Couldn't blockchains offer some new tools to tackle the problem? Imagine for instance wanting to create some incentives by distributing the value of correctly tracking an item to the actors of the supply chain, with some rule like "once the item is sold, part of the revenue gets distributed to all the actors that contributed to the tracking". Wouldn't smart contracts render this simpler to implement, since code is visible by all actors and guaranteed to be executed?
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  That’s digital signatures and business logic with more work and cost.
- binarymax 6y ago
  Please tell me what a blockchain offers here that isn’t solved by several database tables and some business logic?
  - icegreentea2 6y ago
    I think the smart contract part of blockchain doesn't offer much value. But I think the core value proposition of blockchain to supply-chain like situations is to solve the problem of "who's version of the database do we trust", without needing to resort to escrow or other 3rd parties. It won't completely solve the problems of parties being in disagreement - lawyers will still be needed, but it might address a subset of problems.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

slater 6y ago

Don't forget, Cargill is the worst company in the world: https://stories.mightyearth.org/cargill-worst-company-in-the-world/ https://stories.mightyearth.org/cargill-worst-company-in-the...

nitrogen 6y ago
Fair warning: the site has a translucent overlay that takes up half the screen on mobile. Can anyone summarize?
- slater 6y ago
  Here ya go: https://archive.vn/Zfw4P https://archive.vn/Zfw4P
- carapace 6y ago
  FWIW they also have a PDF: https://www.mightyearth.org/wp-content/uploads/Mighty-Earth-Report-Cargill-The-Worst-Company-in-the-World-July-2019.pdf https://www.mightyearth.org/wp-content/uploads/Mighty-Earth-... Or just check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargill#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargill#Criticism

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

high_density 6y ago

github link: https://github.com/Cargill/splinter https://github.com/Cargill/splinter written in rust :D

bnkamalesh 6y ago

https://dibizglobal.com https://dibizglobal.com would be an alternative

bergstromm466 6y ago

Something that really blew my hair back is hREA (formerly Holo-REA) - which is a combination of the Resources Events Agents (REA) accounting method, together with the distributed application framework holochain. It can help us move from corporate Enterprise Resource Planning software to follow (material) resources, to Network Resource Planning software, where all resources are stewarded in the commons based on open access and mutually consenting agreements/protocols. And holochain makes it all easily evolvable and unenclosable. It's one of the most exciting projects I've come across. hREA is aimed at creating a radically inclusive supply chain system. It is fully open source and being developed here: https://github.com/holo-rea/holo-rea https://github.com/holo-rea/holo-rea This is a fun intro: http://mikorizal.org/futures.html http://mikorizal.org/futures.html