OPEN STEWARDSHIP

MSR Standard Governance

How the MSR JSON standard is managed, evolved, and safeguarded as a permanent open public good for the international software ecosystem.

1. Governance Charter

The MSR Standard exists to maintain, advance, and protect the MSR JSON open protocol specification and its associated reference tooling. The organization operates under four non-negotiable principles:

Open Public Good: The specification is permanently licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0), and reference tooling under the permissive MIT License. It cannot be privatized, patented, or encumbered by fees.
Decentralization: Publishers host their manifests on their own root infrastructure. No central authority holds a monopoly on registry crawling, indexing, or verification.
Rough Consensus & Working Code: Architectural decisions are validated by functional, real-world implementations, not corporate voting blocs or closed-door agreements.
Accessibility & Longevity: The standard is designed to endure for decades, emphasizing simplicity, determinism, and backward compatibility.

1.1 Authorship

MSR JSON was designed and written by Antonio Santos — Esplanada, Bahia, Brazil — author of the Craft Engine framework. He is the author of the specification, the JSON Schemas, the reference manifests and the RFC series.

The specification is published under CC-BY 4.0, whose central condition is attribution: every implementation, quotation, translation or derivative of the specification must credit its author.

Authorship and stewardship are separate, deliberately

A specification authored by one person is not a specification controlled by one person. Authorship is a matter of record and of attribution; how the protocol changes is governed by the RFC process, the compatibility policy and the neutrality charter on this page. Neither the author nor any commercial entity can privatize the specification, charge for it, or make implementing it conditional on permission.

2. Protocol Steward Charter

The Protocol Stewards serve as the custodial guardians of the specification. Stewards do not possess unilateral authority to dictate technical direction; rather, they ensure procedural integrity and fidelity to the founding charter.

Duties of Stewards

Facilitate the RFC review process and Working Group deliberations.
Maintain canonical JSON Schema repositories and cryptographic roots.
Ensure that no single commercial vendor exerts undue influence over schema design.
Coordinate security audits and vulnerability disclosures for reference tools.

Stewardship Independence

While commercial platforms (such as MySoftRank and other search registries) consume and implement MSR JSON, the MSR Standard is legally, financially, and operationally independent from all commercial entities.

3. Decision Process

Protocol evolution follows a structured consensus model:

Working Group Review: The proposal is reviewed by the relevant specialized Working Group (e.g., Core Protocol, AI Tooling, Security).
Implementation Proof: The proposal author or community contributors provide at least two independent prototype implementations confirming interoperability.
30-Day Call for Consensus: The RFC is published for public comment. Objections must be technically substantiated.
Ratification: If rough consensus is reached and no unresolved blocking objections remain, the Protocol Stewards formally ratify the RFC and issue a new SemVer release.

4. Compatibility Policy (Strict SemVer)

The MSR JSON standard strictly adheres to Semantic Versioning (SemVer 2.0.0):

Release Scope	Rule	Notice Period
PATCH (2.0.x)	Non-normative clarifications, documentation corrections, or additional schema descriptions. Zero validation impact.	Immediate
MINOR (2.x.0)	Backwards-compatible additions. New optional properties, interfaces, or cryptographic algorithms. Existing valid manifests remain 100% valid.	14 days
MAJOR (x.0.0)	Breaking changes, field deprecation removals, or schema structural modifications. Requires at least one full major version transition bridge.	12-month deprecation notice

5. Neutrality Policy

Vendor Neutrality Guarantee

The MSR JSON specification MUST NOT incorporate proprietary attributes that favor specific commercial registries, proprietary cloud vendors, closed AI foundation models, or sponsored search ranking algorithms.

Under this policy:

No field may require a proprietary authentication key from a third-party registry to achieve valid schema status.
No registry or company may pay to alter schema validation rules or purchase privileged RFC status.
All crawlers, whether operated by non-profits, academic institutions, open-source projects, or commercial companies, are treated equally under the standard.