How GMP evolves

Governance & neutrality.

How the standard is versioned, and how its neutrality is kept structural rather than promised.

Read GOVERNANCE.md →
Principle

Neutrality is the asset.

The spec, suite, and corpus are open source under MIT — that is how a standard earns adoption and trust. The reference store is tested by the same suite as every other backend — no implementation is privileged.

Capability lifecycle
PROPOSED → DRAFT → STABLE → FROZEN

Every capability moves through four stages — proposed (RFC), draft (experimental + tests), stable (API locked), and frozen (immutable). All ten capabilities in v0.2 are frozen: their interface and conformance tests will not change.

  • Each capability cites the requirement (R1–R5) and findings it rests on
  • The corpus is content-addressed and frozen per version (hash f049820b for v0.2.0)
  • The findings registry is append-only — results are added, never rewritten
Changing the spec
In the open, on GitHub

Proposals, discussion, and revisions happen publicly. GMP is currently stewarded by the GNS Foundation; as external implementations adopt it, governance opens to implementers.

  • Propose changes via GitHub issues and pull requests
  • Every normative change is traceable to a requirement and the evidence for it
  • The reference store is tested by the same harness as every other backend — no privileged implementation
  • Process: RFC issue → reference impl → conformance tests → 2-week public review; breaking changes need an implementor supermajority
Full governance document → The specification