spalladino2

OSS meaning operational support system?

Good question. Both libraries and frameworks (the main difference between the two being the inversion of control) are addenda to your application, aimed at providing more features and building blocks to set up more complex behaviours.

zOS takes this one step further, including not only libraries for SC development, but also aiming at defining interoperability standards, mechanics and economics for having independent contracts interact between them as independent actors (or processes, if you will) on a shared computing space that is the blockchain.

I think the key here in terms of semantics is that zOS is not just an Operating System, but rather an Operating System for the blockchain. And when we go there, we don't have many definitions available, but are rather waiting to be made.

First of all, upgrades are opt-in, so you can build on top of the OS and only switch to a new kernel version under certain conditions, such as if all parties in the contract agree.

Also, keep in mind that financial contracts are not subject to hacks, unlike smart contracts, as we have seen several times. One of the goals of upgradeability is the possibility to roll out security patches as needed.

The idea is to avoid falling into a Python 2 vs 3 situation, by being very careful in how we break compatibility when moving to the next major.

See https://gist.github.com/spalladino/10c829db3191a89a8ba73bb00...

We'll probably build it into a more stable shard eventually, but at least we know it's doable