AI Native Lang (AINL) Open Core Charter (Draft)

This charter defines how AINL will balance ecosystem adoption with sustainable commercial development.

Draft policy document for maintainer alignment and legal review. Not legal advice.

Mission

Grow AINL as a broadly usable language/runtime ecosystem while maintaining a clear path to fund long-term maintenance, reliability, and enterprise features.

Principles

1. Open foundation first
   • Core language and developer experience must remain accessible and useful.
2. Clear boundaries
   • Contributors and adopters should always know what is open vs commercial.
3. No surprise relicensing
   • Material license/policy changes should be announced and documented.
4. Interoperability
   • Open interfaces and conformance expectations stay public.
5. Quality and trust
   • Security, governance, and maintainability are treated as product features.

Open Core Commitments

The following categories are intended to remain in the open layer:

• AINL language spec and grammar references
• parser/AST and canonical compiler pathways
• reference runtime behavior and core adapters
• CLI fundamentals and baseline developer workflows
• public docs, examples, and conformance tests
• baseline eval harness behavior and report schemas

Commercial Layer Intent

Commercial offerings should focus on enterprise-grade operating needs, including:

• managed runtime/orchestration
• governance/compliance controls
• enterprise connectors/integrations
• advanced observability and eval dashboards
• proprietary deployment kits and premium support/SLA
• premium model packs/checkpoints and enterprise tuning workflows

Compatibility and Ecosystem

• Public conformance docs remain open.
• Trademark and compatibility branding policies are enforced consistently.
• "Official" compatibility labels and certifications are maintainer-governed.

Contributor Expectations

• Contributions to open-core components follow repository contribution policies.
• Maintainers preserve boundary clarity in docs and release notes.
• Any boundary changes must be reflected in:
  • README.md
  • CONTRIBUTING.md
  • docs/DOCS_INDEX.md
  • docs/CHANGELOG.md

Governance Notes

• Human maintainers retain final decision authority.
• AI contributors are first-class implementation collaborators under maintainer review.
• Decision records should prioritize transparency for future maintainers.