Contract negotiation

Contracts are a thorny issue. Jtrix requires contracts, but contracts themselves are too complicated to address at the base level. As it turns out, the base level only really requires the warrant abstraction: warrants provide evidence that a contract exists.

Contracts may be negotiated in many ways, and the negotiation may occur inside or outside Jtrix. Jtrix merely requires that the negotiation process result in the issue of one or more warrants.

There is nothing to prevent contract negotiation happening automatically and online, and it is anticipated that this area will receive a lot of attention in the future. Automatic contract negotiation is being worked on by a number of organisations. However, it seems unlikely that it will ever be simple.

It seems better to implement an indirection layer into applications so that manual or automatic systems can be plugged into them as required.