With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the author's raw and unedited content as they write—so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles.
This will be the 4th chapter of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on.
If you have comments about how we might improve the content and/or examples in this book, or if you notice missing material within this chapter, please reach out to the editor at mcronin@oreilly.com.
****
As we have seen in previous chapters, a Lightning node is a computer system that participates in the Lightning Network. The Lightning Network is not a product or company, it is a set of open standards that define a baseline for interoperability. As such, Lightning node software has been built by a variety of companies and community groups. The vast majority of Lightning software is _open source_, meaning that the source code is open and licensed in such a way as to enable collaboration, sharing and community participation in the development process. Similarly, the Lightning node implementations we will present in this chapter are all open source and are collaboratively developed.
Unlike Bitcoin, where the standard is defined by a _reference implementation_ in software (Bitcoin Core), in Lightning the standard is defined by a series of standards documents called _Basis of Lightning Technology (BOLT)_, found at the _lightning-rfc_ repository at:
kristen@oreilly.com
3 years ago