The promise, in writing
Governance
Every widely adopted developer standard is owned by somebody. Ownership is not what stops adoption — uncertainty is. The sensible question is not "who owns this" but "what can they do to me later," so the answer is written down, dated, and narrow enough to be checked. Canonical text: GOVERNANCE.md. Steward: IntentMesh Ltd. (in formation). Effective 30 August 2026.
The six commitments
1 · The licence will not be revoked or narrowed
Specification, reference library and vendored emitter are Apache-2.0. The grant on everything already published is irrevocable by the licence's own terms — a property of Apache-2.0, not a promise we are making, and the reason it was chosen over source-available.
2 · No field will ever require an IntentMesh account
A valid fragment can be produced, published, read and merged by somebody who has never heard of this company. No registration, no API key in the format, no callback, no field only we can issue.
3 · The format stays implementable from the specification alone
SPEC.md is normative. Anyone may write a competing implementation without asking. If spec and library ever disagree, one of them is wrong — and we will say which.
4 · Breaking changes get a new version and a reader that accepts both
intent/1 will not change shape under anyone. Tested once already: the format was called backlog/1 before this company existed, and every reader still accepts that key and always will.
5 · No paid tier by subtraction
Commercial products may be built on top; none will be created by taking a capability out of the open format and selling it back. In intent/1 today means in intent/1 tomorrow.
6 · Deprecation gets twelve months and a written reason
"We changed direction" is an acceptable reason. Silence is not.
What is not promised
Stated plainly, because a governance page that only lists reassurances is a marketing page. This is not a foundation and the steward is not neutral — one company decides the roadmap today; if you need a vendor-neutral body, this is not one yet. You do not get a vote — there is no steering committee because there is no community to form one from; when outside organisations run this in production and want a say, that is the moment to build it. No support commitment, no SLA — the format needs no server; anything we host is a separate product. Security is a disclosure process (SECURITY.md), not a guarantee — and that page lists what we do not have, on purpose.