runtime-contracts

Status: v0.1 — proposed canonical contract, implementation adoption pending. No implementation currently claims conformance.

runtime-contracts is the canonical, application-neutral contract package for ReDevOps runtime interoperability. Quantify.club provides the initial fixtures and design discipline but does not own the contracts semantically. Implementations conform through explicit adapters and golden fixtures.

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What this repository owns

• schema identity and versioning
• canonical serialization
• hashing rules
• compatibility rules
• visibility and tenancy semantics
• golden fixtures
• conformance expectations

What it does not own

• planning algorithms
• retrieval logic
• Mission workflow implementations
• storage engines
• runtime-specific business logic

runtime-contracts   the ArtifactHandle wire contract
context-runtime     how handles are selected and materialized
redevops-rag        how candidate handles are retrieved
rag-saas-platform   how MissionProgram is currently executed
quantify            its adapter and application-specific artifacts

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The load-bearing invariant

same handles + same preview plan + same version pins + same contract version
    = same ContextView hash

Across implementations, across process restarts, across languages. Everything in docs/canonicalization.md exists to make that reproducible rather than approximately true.

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v0.1 scope

Specified and modelled now — the subset Phase B requires:

ArtifactHandle · ContextPreviewPlan · ContextView · DereferenceEvent · RuntimeEvent · CapabilityDescriptor · MissionProgram · InvestigationTransitionEvent · VerificationResult · visibility and tenancy types · canonical hashing · adoption manifest · golden fixtures

Specified later — deliberately out of v0.1 so it does not become the whole v10 roadmap:

EvidenceSpanHandle · GraphNeighborhoodHandle · shared object leases · governed merge result · trajectory findings · case bundles · cache-aware session metadata

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Adoption

Conformance is claimed per implementation and per contract, never globally.

python -m runtime_contracts.cli status
python -m runtime_contracts.cli verify --implementation quantify

status reports every implementation's maturity and gaps. verify fails when a component that has claimed a level does not meet it. A component below its release gate fails; a component whose gate is NOT_LOCATED is a visible roadmap gap, not a red build.

Maturity runs NOT_LOCATED → PLANNED → SPECIFIED → ADAPTER_STARTED → ROUND_TRIP_PROVEN → PARTIAL_ADOPTION → CONFORMANT → DEPLOYED_CONFORMANT. Reproducing a golden hash earns ADAPTER_STARTED, not conformance: it proves translation, not adoption.

See adoption/implementations.yaml, IMPLEMENTATION_STATUS.md and docs/release-discipline.md.

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Licence

AGPL-3.0-or-later WITH Commons-Clause — source-available, not open source. See LICENSE.md for the terms and what they permit.

Relicensed from Apache-2.0 on 2026-08-08, and the previous rationale is kept below because it was correct about the trade-off and the trade-off has not changed — only which side of it this project has chosen.

Apache-2.0, deliberately. A contract package has to be importable by every implementation that conforms to it, including ones whose licensing is not yet decided. AGPL on the schemas would make adopting the wire format a licensing decision about the adopter's own code, which is the opposite of what a neutral contract is for. The schemas carry no business logic, so there is nothing here that copyleft would protect.

That reasoning still holds. Adopting these contracts is now a licensing decision about the adopter's own code, and the word "neutral" in this README's opening line should be read as application-neutral — it does not describe the licence. These are canonical within this runtime family, not an open standard anyone may implement commercially.

What changed is the priority: the runtime this package serves is source-available and non-commercial, and a permissive contract layer under a copyleft runtime is a gap through which the semantics leave without the terms.

The licence covers this contract package only. It does not relicense implementations, adapters or runtime code by itself — but anything importing these types to speak the contracts is a work based on this package and takes on its terms. LICENSE.md records the one in-family consequence that follows, concerning mission-sdk's Apache-2.0 grant.

Reversible, and the maintainers'. It is written down here rather than left implicit in a file header. down here rather than left implicit in a file header.