Jolly Roger Charter

Draft. JRCv1 is a working conformance standard, not a software licence, and nothing here is certified. Launch status.

Lineage

Standing on others' shoulders

Two quotations

“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine.”

Thomas Jefferson, letter to Isaac McPherson, August 13, 1813. Source: Monticello, Thomas Jefferson Retirement Series.

Monticello's transcription keeps Jefferson's spelling: “he who recieves an idea from me, recieves instruction himself, without lessening mine;”. We use normalized spelling above. The letter is mostly about patents and inventions, so it shouldn't be read as Jefferson rejecting every form of copyright.

“Information should be free but your time should not.”

Steve Wozniak, replying to Stewart Brand at the 1984 Hackers Conference, as recounted by Steven Levy in “Hackers at 30: ‘Hackers’ and ‘Information Wants to Be Free’”, WIRED, November 21, 2014.

This comes from Levy's 2014 retrospective, not a 1984 transcript.

Prior Art and Originality: Acknowledge the Lineage

Conclusion: There are clear precedents for each major building block. The combination of public-domain aspiration, complete agentic reproducibility, atproto-centered data control, replaceable stewardship, public operating costs and community-driven optimization is a potentially distinctive synthesis, not a verified global first. A web search cannot prove no earlier implementation exists.

Relevant precedents

Precedent Shared idea Distinction to test
GNU Manifesto / FSF Four freedoms, sharing, paid service can coexist with free code Common GNU strategies use copyleft instead of unrestricted public-domain dedication
SQLite Public-domain software alongside paid support Not a generalized agentic process and public-cost transparency standard
Ghost Open-source, managed hosting, public-facing economics Not generally a public-domain/atproto/agent-log reproducibility program
Creative Commons / CC0 Waiving copyright constraints for owned works Provides legal tools, not service or deployment governance
Free culture / Copyheart / remix movements Art built through copying and transformation Primarily cultural expression and licensing advocacy
AT Protocol Portable identity and data records / open Lexicons Not a blanket privacy or universal operational-cost solution
GitHub Spec Kit Agentic spec-driven workflow, prompts, project process Not the same economic and user-sovereignty pledge
FOCUS / OpenCost / Infracost / OpenTofu Normalized billing, allocation, cost proposals and reproducible infra Proposed charter makes transparency and outside optimization required dimensions of a movement
Open Source Maintenance Fee Explicit maintenance economics Varies in commercial restrictions; this charter welcomes competitors' resale and profit
Early hacker movement and 1984 Hackers Conference Sharing information alongside charging for time Present concept is also about data and independently reproducing operations

Originality claims to avoid

Safer formulation

“We are assembling a practical, independently verifiable standard that brings free software, reproducible agentic development, user-controlled data, transparent operations and competitive stewardship under one charter.”

Research program before large launch

  1. Invite GNU/FSF, OSI, Creative Commons, CC0 and SQLite specialists to identify missing history.
  2. Search academic, legal, maintainer and agentic engineering examples for prior efforts at operational freedom.
  3. Document disputed claims and linked sources in the issue tracker.
  4. Publish corrections promptly and cite intellectual predecessors.

Useful sources: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html ; https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html ; https://ghost.org/ ; https://creativecommons.org/public-domain/ ; https://github.github.com/spec-kit/ ; https://focus.finops.org/ ; https://atproto.com/guides/overview

Further sources

This is a list of research references, not a claim of organizational affiliation or endorsement. Statements may change over time.

Historical quotations

Foundational software freedom

User-controlled and permissioned records

Reproducibility and economics

Precedent business models

Further diligence to perform