Governance
Runink River starts as a single-vendor project stewarded by Runink, with a written path to
vendor-neutral governance under a foundation. The authoritative text is
GOVERNANCE.md; the draft foundation-era charter is CHARTER.md.
Roles
- Users run Runink River. Contributors send issues, reviews, docs or code.
- Maintainers (
MAINTAINERS.md) review and merge, triage issues and security reports, cut and sign releases, and enforce the invariants and the Code of Conduct. - The Technical Steering Committee (TSC): while there are fewer than five maintainers, all of them. From five, an elected TSC of three to seven, with no employer holding more than a third of the seats.
How decisions are made
Lazy consensus: a proposal is accepted if no maintainer objects within the review window.
| Change | Needs |
|---|---|
| Bug fix, docs, a routine pin bump | 1 maintainer approval (not the author) |
| New feature, new package, new workflow | 1 approval and no objection within 3 working days |
| An invariant (s6, one kernel, ZFS root, no runtime fetch, no secrets in the image, the sandbox deny-list, …) | TSC vote, 2/3 majority, 7 days |
| Licensing, trademark, charter, governance, maintainers | TSC vote, 2/3 majority, 7 days |
Votes happen on the issue or pull request, so there is a public record.
Commercial products
Runink River ships no proprietary components. Any vendor, Runink included, may build products on it, outside this repository. Nothing here requires a proprietary component to build, boot or test the image, and no vendor holds a veto outside the TSC.
Path to a foundation
| Phase | State |
|---|---|
| 0: private preparation | done |
| 1: public, single-vendor | the current phase once the repository is public |
| 2: foundation application | planned: the LF AI & Data Sandbox proposal is a draft, not yet submitted (docs/governance/lfaidata-proposal.md) |
| 3: vendor-neutral | trademark and domain assigned to the foundation, charter adopted, maintainers from two or more organisations |