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Protocol Governance

GMP is governed in the open by the GNS Foundation, which maintains the canonical specification, the conformance suite, and the reference backend. The spec, suite, and corpus are MIT-licensed; GOVERNANCE.md is canonical.

Versioning​

GMP follows semantic versioning (MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH):

  • MAJOR — breaking changes: new required methods, removed capabilities, incompatible schema.
  • MINOR — additive, non-breaking: new optional capabilities, new conformance tests, new workloads.
  • PATCH — fixes, docs, tooling.

Current protocol version: 0.2.0.

Decision authority​

Protocol changes follow a four-step process:

  1. RFC — a GitHub Issue describing motivation, design, and migration path.
  2. Reference implementation — a working change against the reference backend.
  3. Conformance tests — new or updated tests validating the change.
  4. Review period — a minimum two-week public review before merge.

Capability additions are non-breaking, so existing backends are never affected by new optional capabilities. Breaking changes (e.g. v1 → v2) require a supermajority vote among active implementors.

Conformance is the source of truth​

A capability is supported iff its conformance tests pass. Tests are additive — new tests may arrive in minor releases, but existing tests are never removed or weakened. M8 (conformance_rate) is the single scalar summary: the fraction of applicable conformance assertions that pass.

Implementor rights​

  • Any project may implement MemoryBackend without prior approval.
  • Conformance reports are self-certifiable by running grafomem conformance against the public suite.
  • The GNS Foundation maintains a public registry of certified implementations.
  • Honest omission is never penalized — the protocol rewards transparency, not feature count.

Neutrality​

The reference store is tested by the same harness as every other backend — there is no privileged implementation. Conformance verdicts depend only on the public suite and corpus, not on who maintains the protocol.

Source: GOVERNANCE.md