GOVERNANCE // OVERVIEW

Governance

ostk keeps governance in signed, inspectable project documents rather than a hosted permissions dashboard. Identity evidence and capability policy stay local.

GOVERNANCE_DOCUMENTS

HUMANFILE

Models, secrets, trust policy, pin defaults, operator identity

T0 only

ENTITYFILE

OS identity, key registry, fleet state, laws

T0 only (negotiate protocol)

.primefile

Project identity evidence, kernel version, signing authority, lineage

Created by init; verified at boot

Agentfile

Agent model, prompt, tools, limits, isolation, attestation

T0 or T1 (signed)

The modify-governance token denies these writes for T1 and lower by default. Operator-authored pin profiles may declare explicit path exceptions. → Capability Pins

Trust Tiers

Identity resolves from HUMANFILE and a verified primefile first, with GPG as a fallback. Four tiers define the default posture from full governance to anonymous.

Full governance

Verified local or configured trust root.

Guarded source writes

Identity endorsed by a T0 root.

Read-oriented

Identity present without T0 endorsement.

Anonymous

No resolved identity; writes denied by default.

Full details: Trust Model

The Five Laws

01 The project surface stays familiar

02 Durable state outlives a process

03 Coordinate through the filesystem

04 Optimistic concurrency

05 Infrastructure should stay inspectable

These principles describe the intended architecture; each implementation claim still needs a named scope and verification evidence. → Five principles in practice

SIGNING_CHAIN

DEVELOPMENT

Commits follow the repository's configured author-signing policy

RELEASE

Repository commit signed by the institutional key (@ostk.ai)

BINARY

Release binaries signed by the CI key (cross-signed by root)

VERIFICATION

Any user can verify any artifact against the public key

Source Availability & Open Source Transition

The ostk framework has transitioned to public repositories. All runtime elements — the daemon CLI (ostk), prompt cache (ostk-cache), and memory MCP server (ostk-recall) — are open-source under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0).

The userspace client library (libostk) is licensed under the permissive MIT License to allow seamless programmatic integrations.