open-source.sgit.ai / documents
The documents
A site that argues you should publish the source next to the render owes a reader its own. These are the briefs this site was built from, published whole and unedited. Where a page here summarises, disagrees with, or declines to follow one of them, the raw markdown is the source of truth and you can check.
How to read these. The brief pack was written to the agent commissioning this site, so it reads as instructions rather than as content — including instructions this site did not follow, and open questions it could not close. That is the useful part. Where the site diverges from the brief is listed at the bottom of this page.
The commissioning brief pack
| Document | What it holds | Where it landed |
|---|---|---|
| 00 — The brief | The commission, the honest split across the three asks, the thesis, the five pages only this author can write, the two dated changes of position, and the build order. | Front page, build order |
| 01 — Concepts index | All 56 concepts with verbatim quotes, paths and dates, classified as widely-held, personal position, or original argument. 24 originals. | The position |
| 02 — The practice | The three-licence estate, the CC0 discovery, publish-the-source-next-to-the-render, the read-key discipline, and the compliance gap. | Practice, publish the source |
| 03 — The history, and how to use it | The editorial guidance: lead with corrections not a timeline, pick six success stories not fourteen, and the numbers to handle carefully. | History |
| 04 — The arguments | Survivability, the stress test, open core, funding, sovereignty, the villagers — with the counter-case for each. | Survivability, funding, views |
| 05 — Agents and open source | Code-reading as the scarce asset, the March/July change of position, and four theses that are named nowhere and written nowhere. | Agents |
| 06 — OWASP and the summits | The OWASP thread, four summits, and the interview that has to happen — thirteen questions ready. | OWASP |
| 07 — Architecture and boundaries | The house pattern, the quoting table, do-not-publish, and the network boundaries between sibling sites. | Boundaries, and this site's structure |
| 08 — Gaps and open questions | Ten build-fresh items, eight open questions, eight honest tensions. | What's next, open questions |
| 09 — Source manifest | 55 rows: every source tiered 0–3 with its proposed page and publishability. Every path verified on disk. | Provenance for the whole pack |
The history research
| research — the history, from scratch ~18,000 words · compiled 24 August 2026 |
The single largest document behind this site, and the reason the history section exists at all: the author's writing contained no history of open source, so one was researched. A sourced timeline 1955→2026, fourteen success stories, two instructive failures, an evidence table, seven both-sides arguments, seventeen corrected myths, and a source list that separates what was fetched from what was only search-derived.
It reports its fetch failures inline rather than working around them, and marks several facts as not verified. Those are listed on this site as unpublished rather than quietly promoted to established. |
The pack's own front matter
- README — the reading order, and the four things the pack said would shape the build.
- LICENSE — CC BY 4.0, the three-licence problem, and the quoting table that governs how this site handles other people's material.
Where this site diverges from the brief
Publishing the instructions makes the divergences checkable, so they are stated rather than left to be found.
| The brief said | What was done, and why |
|---|---|
| "Resolve the licensing inconsistency before writing a word" — it is described as blocking the practice section. | Resolved by the author on 6 September 2026: CC BY. Until then both readings were published and neither picked, because declaring an intention on his behalf would have been the tidying this site argues against. The decision is recorded on the practice page and Q5 is closed. |
"Copy pki.sgit.ai. Add the /llms-full.txt it lacks." |
Done, and extended. Same CI pipeline (validate → tag → deploy), same chrome tooling. llms-full.txt ships, and so does a markdown twin at every URL — generated, and enforced by the build rather than maintained by hand. |
| "Ship the stress test as a form or checklist, not an essay." | Done — it runs in the browser, keeps your answers locally, and exports a markdown summary. Nothing is sent anywhere. |
"Ship /practice/ with an SBOM, or state the gap with a date." |
Stated as a gap, without a date — which the brief itself calls the weaker of the two options. It is first on the build order. |
| Publish market figures from the villagers brief. | Declined. The brief flags them as loosely attributed and notes that much of what circulates is vendor commentary recycling a smaller set of studies. They are omitted, and the omission is stated on the page. |
| Do not publish a marked-unverified fact as established. | Followed. The unverifiable claims have their own section, naming what was not established and why, rather than being silently dropped. |
On quoting other people's material. This site quotes the open-source world at length, under the rules in the pack's licence file: Wikipedia material is CC BY-SA and is quoted with attribution rather than adapted; project documentation is quoted briefly and never mirrored; vendor and analyst reports are cited by number, source, date and caveat, and their charts are never reproduced. Naming projects, foundations, licences and the public authors of public work is fine and necessary. Running the stress test on a named commercial competitor and publishing a scorecard is not — we ship the test and let readers run it.