An independent company,
and what it holds.
Tacit Source is the commercial licensor of Even Steven skills. We hold a licence from Even Steven, and under it we hold the registry that keeps a named way of working, the release path that carries one to a machine, and the count that meters the hours it runs. We do not contract with the person in the seat. This page says who is on the other side of every paper.
Three parties, and each one knows which of the others it has signed with.
This is not a chart of who reports to whom. It is a list of agreements, and every claim made anywhere on this site is a claim about one of them.
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01
The person An operator, in their own seat, on their own machine, on their own job. They sign with Even Steven. Nobody else contracts with them — not their employer, and not us. Nothing of ours is connected to that machine's controls while a session is recorded, and the machine is neither driven by us nor modified by us.
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Even Steven Even Steven holds the corpus of recorded ways of working. It is the person's counterparty and the holder of their consent — four separate permissions, each signed on its own and each ended on its own, free, on the person's own say, effective on receipt and needing nobody's agreement. Even Steven licenses the corpus to Tacit Source.
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Tacit Source We are the commercial licensor of Even Steven skills: an independent company holding a licence from Even Steven, marketing under it, and holding the registry, the release path and the count. A machine maker, a kit company or a fleet owner deals with us.
Two papers run through this company, and there is no third.
The first paper is between the person and Even Steven. The second is between Even Steven and Tacit Source: the corpus licence we market under. Between Tacit Source and the person in the seat there is no paper at all. We hold no agreement with them. We take no permission from them. We do not ask them for one. What reaches us reaches us under the licence, on terms Even Steven settled with the person before any licensee was in the picture.
That arrangement answers a live problem in the law of consent, and it answers it structurally rather than by undertaking to behave well.
Given the imbalance of power between an employer and its staff members, employees can only give free consent in exceptional circumstances, when it will have no adverse consequences at all whether or not they give consent.
European Data Protection Board · Guidelines 05/2020 on consent, ¶¶21–23
A person asked to sign by the company that licenses their work to their employer's supplier is being asked for a permission in the middle of a chain of pressure. So they are not asked. They sign with Even Steven, in their own seat, on their own machine, on their own time, and the money follows the hour a machine runs rather than the signature. Whether paying a person can ever make their consent valid is an open question — no jurisdiction we have surveyed answers it — and the architecture is built so that the answer does not change what the person in the seat gets.
A person with a question about their own record, their own consent or their own withdrawal takes it to Even Steven. It is their counterparty, and it is the party that can answer.
Individual skills, or sets and series, at our discretion.
The licence from Even Steven lets us offer either, and the choice of which to offer is ours.
A skill is one named person's way of running one family of machine. It is chosen by name before the work starts and metered by the machine-hour it runs. A set, or a series, is several named skills licensed together under one paper — chosen by name one member at a time, metered separately, attributed separately.
A set is a shelf, not a stew. Licensing several skills together never merges them.
Each member of a set stays separately named, separately selectable, separately counted and separately endable. When one person ends theirs, theirs ends and the rest of the set carries on. We do not license a blend, and a set is not one.
The reason is not taste. A per-person count and a per-person withdrawal are honourable exactly where each person's contribution stays a separately addressable thing. Once contributions are fitted together into one set of model weights, checking afterwards whether one person's influence was removed is not a hard engineering problem — it is formally unavailable from the delivered artefact (Thudi, Jia, Shumailov and Papernot, On the Necessity of Auditable Algorithmic Definitions for Machine Unlearning, USENIX Security 2022). Separability is therefore not a feature of what we license. It is the condition on which every other undertaking this company gives can be kept.
Who signs with whom.
Two papers, three parties, and a deliberate break where a fourth would be.
Fig. 1 — Three parties, two papers. Sealed objects carry a mark; the broken rule marks the place where no agreement exists.
A separation anybody can check is a separation in the corporate register.
The Data Governance Act, Regulation (EU) 2022/868, sets out what it takes to stand between the people a record comes from and the parties that want to use it. Article 11(1) requires such a service to act as an intermediary only, and not to use the data it exchanges for any other purpose. Article 11(2) requires pricing neutrality. Article 11(3) requires the service to be provided through a separate legal person from the provider's other activities.
The Act forces a choice between being the pipe and being a user of what flows through it, and it forces that choice to be structural rather than a policy a provider states it will follow.
We do not assert that Tacit Source is a data intermediation service under that Regulation. That question belongs to counsel and it is open. What we say is narrower and checkable: the separation is built the way that Act would require of one. Even Steven holds the corpus and the person's consent. Tacit Source holds the licence, the registry, the release path and the count. Neither company is a department of the other.
A policy can be rewritten by whoever wrote it, quietly, between one version of a page and the next. A second company cannot be rewritten that way. That is the reason the line is drawn where it is.
A short list, and a shorter one.
The money, the count, the deletion
The money owed for the hours run. The count those hours come off, which a second party can check at source. And the deletion — an out-of-service date and a true date, given to the person together, with the shorter never allowed to stand in for the longer.
Those three are what our agreements are written to make enforceable, and they are the whole list.
The machine, the job, the output
Not the machine. Not the job it is doing. Not the output of either. No part of any safety case rests on anything we supply.
We are not a designer, manufacturer, integrator or supplier of any machine or any driver, and we do not become one by licensing a named way of working to a party that is.
A withdrawal is never a breach by us, is never a failure of supply, and gives a licensee no claim of any kind. It stops for new work at once; a job already underway finishes, because stopping a machine mid-pass is its own hazard. That is the one delay in it, and neither we nor a licensee can extend it.
One specification, on the same terms to everybody who builds against it.
Steady Eddie, the machine company inside our own group, builds machines and takes the interface on the same terms every other party takes it on, with no earlier sight of it. There is one specification; it is offered on the same terms to every party that builds against it. Steady Eddie gets no earlier sight of it, no private variant, and no term another party cannot have.
This is the separation above, applied to the second place it could quietly be lost. A licensor that favours its own sibling is a user of the flow pretending to be the pipe. Equal terms are not a courtesy extended to competitors; they are the condition on which a maker can build to the interface at all, since a maker that suspects the interface bends for one party has no reason to build to it.
The rule at the foot of every page on this site is the company's own rule, and it governs what we build and what we refuse to build: a way of working proposes, a person authorizes, safety has veto.
A way of working proposes
A release proposes and never authorizes. It is fixed when it is made and does not change on a machine without a person putting it there.
A person authorizes
A person on the crew chooses a named way of working deliberately before the work starts. There is no default and no last-used: a machine carrying yesterday's choice forward would be running on nobody's authority.
Safety has veto
Safety overrides both. Nothing we supply is placed anywhere it could overrule a machine's own safety function, and nothing we supply is offered as part of one.
Working out who you would actually be dealing with?
Tell us which one you are, and the answer arrives with the papers behind it.