Minimisation of central authorities

One of our principles is to avoid creating central authorities. Many problems are more easily solved when one postulates some central service that can coordinate and authenticate an effort. Jtrix applications are characterised by organic, dynamic deployments and linkages between disparate entities.

If an application needs a central authority, we should at least allow people to choose it. And give them a real choice, rather than a simple blanket statement like ``Well, you can use any authority you like, but if you don't choose this one, it won't work.''

Central authorities, while being generally useful, present problems. They can increase the amount of red tape involved and violate our wishes for the system to enable the use of administratively heterogeneous resources. Indeed, one could probably define ``administratively heterogenous'' (in our introductory sentence of Section ) as the absence of a central authority.