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Agent OS
AOS-GOV-005 Normative foundation

Community Launch and Maintainer Formation

Community Launch and Maintainer Formation: scope, decisions, requirements, evidence, risks, and traceability for the Agent OS programme.

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Community Launch and Maintainer Formation

This document defines how decisions, contributions, funding, security reports, partnerships, and public claims are governed.

Table of Contents

Purpose and Scope

Area: Governance.

This document defines how decisions, contributions, funding, security reports, partnerships, and public claims are governed.

This document owns the semantics implied by Community Launch and Maintainer Formation. It does not assert that every described subsystem already exists. It defines the target model, constraints, evidence needed to trust an implementation, and the boundary with adjacent documents.

Normative Position

  1. Publish ownership, decision, review, conflict-of-interest, contribution, security disclosure, licensing, and evidence policies before broad recruitment.
  2. Use scoped bounties for reproducible outputs, not vague subsystem completion.
  3. Contact vendors, researchers, counsel, labs, communities, standards bodies and potential maintainers with precise asks.

Operating Model

The operating model is contract-first and evidence-driven. A component declares its authority, resources, lifecycle, error model, cancellation and timeout behavior, observability, version, and compatibility promise. Backends are replaceable only when the same conformance suite passes and no forbidden platform type leaks into portable layers.

Implementation proceeds through a reference model or mock, deterministic QEMU evidence where relevant, documentation-first physical hardware, and quality-hardware evidence. Pixel 9 adapters remain quarantined according to ADR-0004.

Requirements

  • R01. Publish ownership, decision, review, conflict-of-interest, contribution, security disclosure, licensing, and evidence policies before broad recruitment.
  • R02. Use scoped bounties for reproducible outputs, not vague subsystem completion.
  • R03. Contact vendors, researchers, counsel, labs, communities, standards bodies and potential maintainers with precise asks.
  • R04. Specify normal, partial, denied, timeout, cancellation, restart, upgrade, and permanent-failure behavior.
  • R05. Expose structured diagnostics without leaking secrets or vendor-specific implementation details.
  • R06. Link material unknowns to a claim and, when testable, an experiment with an owner and gate.
  • R07. Update affected documentation and task data when evidence changes the model.

Failure and Degradation

Degradation must be explicit rather than accidental. The system reports capability absence, reduced quality, unavailable provider, stale data, or unsafe condition through typed states. It must not silently fall back to broader authority, unrestricted legacy execution, unverified firmware, lossy data migration, or irreversible agent action.

Recovery defines what state is retained, reconstructed, re-enrolled, compensated, or intentionally discarded. Unsupported hardware or providers are rejected at binding time where possible.

Evidence and Acceptance

  • Accepted contribution through full provenance path.
  • Maintainer and response-time metrics.
  • Partner/contact register with result and next action.
  • Evidence records target identity, hardware revision, firmware, source commit, toolchain, configuration, seed, timestamps, artifacts, expected result, actual result, and reviewer.
  • Acceptance requires the referenced tasks to meet their own criteria; prose completion is not implementation completion.

Implementation Obligations

Task Obligation Priority Gate/Milestone Verification
AOS-COMM-102 Recruit initial kernel, camera, hardware, legal, and documentation advisers P0 M2 Run the relevant document, schema, conformance, build, experiment, or hardware checks; independently review boundary compliance and acceptance criteria.
AOS-COMM-103 Publish an honest public roadmap and contribution boundary P1 M8 Run the relevant document, schema, conformance, build, experiment, or hardware checks; independently review boundary compliance and acceptance criteria.

Risks and Open Questions

  • Community expectations can exceed project capacity.
  • Unreviewed contributions can contaminate provenance.
  • Funding can distort architecture or public claims.
  • Open-question rule: an unanswered high-impact question becomes a claim/experiment record and cannot be hidden in meeting notes.
  • Stop rule: work stops or changes track when legal rights, recovery, debug access, safety, or the required evidence path is unavailable.

Related Documents

Planning Reference Anchors

Launch Gate

AOS-COMM-103 — Publish an honest public roadmap and contribution boundary; AOS-COMM-103 — Publish an honest public roadmap and contribution boundary

Maintainers

AOS-COMM-102 — Recruit initial kernel, camera, hardware, legal, and documentation advisers

Narrative

AOS-COMM-103 — Publish an honest public roadmap and contribution boundary; AOS-COMM-103 — Publish an honest public roadmap and contribution boundary