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Project Governance

Joch is a PeasantsAI project. Day-to-day technical decisions are made by maintainers; major changes go through a public RFC process; the trademark is held by PeasantsAI to keep the canonical project unambiguous.

Maintainership

Each repository under peasantsai/joch* has a maintainers file (MAINTAINERS.md) listing current maintainers, their areas of focus, and their contact handles.

Maintainer responsibilities:

  • triage incoming issues weekly,
  • review and merge PRs,
  • shepherd RFCs through public comment,
  • represent the repository at community calls.

New maintainers are nominated by existing maintainers, with public announcement and a comment window before confirmation.

Steering

A neutral Joch Steering Committee sets cross-repo direction:

  • the canonical roadmap (the public version of Roadmap lives here),
  • the boundary between OSS and commercial offerings,
  • the relationship with standards bodies (OWASP AOS, MCP, OpenTelemetry GenAI),
  • conflict resolution between repositories or maintainers.

The committee includes PeasantsAI-employed and independent members. Membership is announced publicly. Quarterly minutes are published.

RFC process

Significant changes go through an RFC in peasantsai/joch-spec:

  1. Author opens a PR adding rfcs/####-title.md.
  2. Maintainers and community comment for at least 14 days (or longer for cross-repo changes).
  3. The proposing repo's maintainers (or the steering committee, if cross-repo) accept, request changes, or reject.
  4. Accepted RFCs are merged and tracked to implementation in linked issues.

Templates and example RFCs live in rfcs/0000-template.md.

License and CLA

  • Apache-2.0 across all open-source repos.
  • Contributing requires accepting the Apache-2.0 license terms by submitting the PR. There is no separate CLA.

Trademark policy

Joch, Joch Cloud, Joch Enterprise, Joch Console, Joch Operator, Joch Registry, and Joch Marketplace are trademarks of PeasantsAI. Forks of the open-source project are allowed under Apache-2.0 but may not use the trademarks in branding or marketing.

The detailed Trademark Policy is published separately and updated as the project grows.

Releases

  • Each repository has its own release cadence and CHANGELOG.md.
  • The control-plane core (peasantsai/joch) targets monthly minor releases and patch releases as needed.
  • Adapters target releases tied to upstream SDK / provider versions.
  • A canonical compatibility matrix lists supported core / adapter / spec versions.

Public communication channels

  • GitHub Issues and Discussions on each repository.
  • Slack / Discord (linked in repository READMEs).
  • Quarterly community call (recorded; agenda public).
  • Mailing list announcements at major releases.

Conflict resolution

Conflicts that maintainers cannot resolve escalate to the steering committee. The committee decides by simple majority. Decisions and rationale are recorded in the meeting minutes.

Joining as a vendor or partner

Vendors interested in shipping their MCP servers, tools, or framework adapters as official entries should:

  1. Open a registry PR with a draft entry,
  2. Engage with the relevant repository's maintainers,
  3. Pass the conformance suite where applicable.

Vendors do not need to be PeasantsAI customers to ship in the open registry.

Honest summary

The project is run as an open-source project, with a commercial entity behind it that benefits from broad, well-governed adoption. The governance model prioritizes clarity, accountability, and durability of the canonical project — not control over contributors' work.