Honestly qualify the governance nature of the solutions we distribute#
What this is, concretely#
This commitment consists of describing accurately, in your commercial discourse and your catalogue, the governance nature of the solutions you propose. Concretely, this means publicly distinguishing neutral multi-vendor foundation projects (PostgreSQL, Linux, Kubernetes, OpenTofu, Valkey, OpenSearch) from single-vendor projects with a commercial enterprise edition (Redis Inc., HashiCorp Inc. now under IBM, Elastic NV, MongoDB Inc.), as well as from closed proprietary solutions. The distinction is not a value judgement — each model has its legitimacy and its use cases — but information the client needs in order to make an informed decision.
The commitment specifically targets the “100% open source” marketing that aggregates indiscriminately projects with very different governance structures. It asks that you name the governance nature when relevant: for example, not presenting a solution embedding Redis 7.4 under BSL/SSPL in March 2024 as “based on an open source standard” without qualifying the licence situation.
Why this commitment matters#
The manifesto devotes thesis 3 to this question: “adopting free software does not make us sovereign: it makes us eligible to become so, provided we invest in everything that makes free software actually free.” Thesis 5 follows: “an open source project whose contributions, artefacts, or roadmap depend on a single sponsor is a revocable free project.” Marketing that aggregates without distinction prevents buyers from seeing this difference — and therefore from properly assessing their exposure.
For you as a provider, honest qualification has two beneficial effects. In the short term, it sets you apart from providers practising sovereignty-washing through superficial aggregation. Informed buyers — and they are growing in number — value it. In the medium term, it protects you: if your client tomorrow suffers a licence flip on a component you sold them without qualifying its single-vendor nature, your credibility takes a hit. Proactive qualification lets you share the risk through information, rather than carry it alone through silence.
The commitment naturally reinforces pub-001-publish-sovereignty-profile and pub-006-publish-component-jurisdiction-list: it aligns commercial discourse with public technical documentation. Without alignment, public documentation loses its force.
A concrete example#
A European SaaS publisher of 22 people, offering an analytics platform that embeds several third-party components, takes this commitment in April 2026 with a 6-month horizon. The marketing team and the technical team work together to revise the commercial content. Three actions are carried out. First, the “technology” page of the website is rewritten to explicitly distinguish the components: PostgreSQL is qualified as “a robust European-distributed foundation”, Apache Kafka as “an Apache Foundation project (United States)”, Elasticsearch is now qualified as “a single-vendor project under Elastic NV with triple licensing since August 2024”, and an inset explains the licence trajectory since 2010. Second, commercial materials and client presentations include a standard slide on the governance nature of components. Third, the publisher adds in its catalogue an explicit mention whenever a component has undergone a licence flip in the past five years.
By the end of the 6 months, several prospects mention in their feedback that this transparency helped convince them. A direct competitor follows suit shortly after.
Anti-pattern to avoid#
A “sovereignty” page on the website that aggregates all components indistinctly as “open source and compliant with best practice” is precisely what the commitment seeks to move beyond. Symmetrically, a negative and alarmist presentation of every non-European component would lose the factual dimension. The tone to aim for: precise, neutral, informative. The client forms a judgement from the clear information you give them.
Success indicators#
By the 6-month horizon, you can reasonably consider this commitment fulfilled if your product pages, public documentation, and commercial materials explicitly qualify the governance nature of structuring third-party components, if an internal procedure embeds this qualification for newly added components, and if an annual review is scheduled to update the qualification in line with licence developments.
JSON schema category: communication. Default horizon: 6 months. Applicable to: businesses.