From a seat to a signed hour, in one read.
A person works their own machine, their own way, on their own job. That way of working is recorded with their permission, held under their name, licensed by us to a machine that runs it, metered by the hour it runs, and paid back to them out of the same signed row the licensee is invoiced on. Everything on this site is one link in that chain.
Three parties, and the order they sign in.
The order is the architecture. It is what lets a promise made to a person in a seat survive contact with a commercial licence.
The person
An operator, in their own seat, on their own machine, on their own work. They sign with Even Steven. Nobody else contracts with them, and that includes us. They are not signing with an employer, and putting the paper outside the employment relationship is the whole reason it is drawn that way.
Even Steven
Holds the corpus of recorded ways of working. It is the person's counterparty and the holder of their consent, and it is the party their permissions run to and are ended against. It licenses the corpus to Tacit Source.
Tacit Source
The commercial licensor of Even Steven skills. We hold a licence from Even Steven and we market under it. We are the company a machine maker, a kit company or a fleet owner deals with, and we are the company that runs the registry, the release path and the count.
We never contract with the person in the seat. We run the mechanism that makes their agreement enforceable at the machine — the registry that holds their work under their name, the release that carries it, and the count that pays them for the hours it runs.
Eight links, and every claim we make is a claim about one of them.
If a sentence on this site cannot be pointed at one of these eight steps, it does not belong on it.
A person, their machine, their job
A person works their own machine, their own way, on work that was going to happen anyway. Nothing of ours is connected to that machine's controls while a session is recorded. The machine is not being driven by us and is not being modified.
One sitting, sealed when it is made
One recording of one person working, sealed at the moment it is made. It carries, inside itself, who made it and what they permitted — not in a register kept beside it.
The recordAccepted, or refused with the reason named
Every session is accepted or refused, and a refusal names its reason. Consent is read at the moment of recording. A consent given afterwards does not reach back over a session already made.
AdmissionA named way of working, held apart
One person, one family of machine, built only from sessions that person consented to. Entries are held and addressed by name, one at a time, and kept separately addressable.
The registryWhat crosses, and nothing else
What reaches a machine is a sealed package a named person signed for, built for the controls that machine already has, and refusable on inspection. It carries a digest of what went into it, never the contents.
The releaseOne name at a time, chosen before the work
A machine runs one named way of working at a time, chosen deliberately before the work starts. No default and no last-used. The package proposes, a person authorizes, and safety has veto.
The clearance is the meter
The act that clears the machine to run is the act that starts the count. Clearance and invoice come off one signed row, signed at the machine, so neither can be adjusted without the other.
The countThe same row, read the other way
The hour that is invoiced and the hour that is paid are the same signed row. A licensee's charge and the person's pay are one record read from two sides, not two reconciled afterwards.
The chain, top to bottom.
The dashed rules are as load-bearing as the arrows. What does not cross is what makes the rest of it licensable.
Fig. 1 — The chain as one descent. Sealed objects carry a mark; dashed rules are boundaries information does not cross.
Two things, and the choice between them is ours.
Tacit Source markets individual skills and corpus sets — series at our discretion. Both run on the chain above. What changes between them is how many names are on the paper.
A skill
One named person's way of running one family of machine. Chosen by name before the work starts, metered by the machine-hour it runs, attributed to the person it came from, and ended when that person ends theirs.
A skillA set, or a series
Several named skills licensed together under one paper. Each member is still chosen by name, one at a time, before each piece of work. Each is metered separately and attributed separately. When one person ends theirs, the rest of the set carries on.
Sets and seriesA set is a shelf, not a stew. Licensing several skills together never merges them. Each member stays separately named, separately selectable, separately counted and separately endable. We do not license a blend, and a set is not one.
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 & Papernot, On the Necessity of Auditable Algorithmic Definitions for Machine Unlearning, USENIX Security Symposium, 2022. Separability is therefore not a feature. It is the condition on which every other promise here can be kept.
Three things that never happen.
Name what does not cross and the rest becomes checkable. These three are the reason every other sentence on this site can be specific.
Nothing of ours is connected while a session is recorded
The machine at the seat is not driven by us, not modified by us, and carries nothing of ours on its controls while a person works. The session is a record of work that was happening anyway. That is what makes it the person's own work rather than a joint product.
A machine never receives a session
What crosses to a machine is a release, not a recording. No session, no part of one, and nothing identifying the person beyond the name the licence runs under. The package carries a digest of what went into it; the contents stay where they were admitted. A machine that has run a named way of working for a year holds no record of anybody.
A released package does not learn in the field
What is released is fixed. It does not change on a machine because it has been run, and it does not change because of the work it has seen. A different way of working reaches a machine when a person puts it there, deliberately, by name — never because the machine drifted into one.
Directive (EU) 2024/2853 applies from 9 December 2026 to products placed on the market after that date. Article 7(2)(c) requires a court to take into account "the effect on the product of any ability to continue to learn or acquire new features after it is placed on the market or put into service", and a substantial modification can arise "due to the continuous learning of an AI system", which makes the modified product newly placed on the market at the moment the modification is made.
Whether routine incremental refinement crosses that threshold is untested. No judgment anywhere has addressed it. A fixed release is the design decision that keeps the question off the table. The legal position
A short list, and a shorter one beside it.
The money, the count, the deletion
The money owed. The hours counted are paid through to the person they are attributed to, out of the same signed row the licensee is invoiced on.
The count. Clearance and invoice come off one signed row, signed at the machine, and both sides can check it at source rather than against a statement we write.
The deletion. When a person ends a permission, two dates follow and the person is told both, never one: the out-of-service date, when the entry stops being choosable, and the true date, when the last copy is gone, backups included. The shorter is never allowed to stand in for the longer.
The machine, the job, the output
Not the machine. Not the job. Not what comes out 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 nothing we license makes us one. The package proposes; a person authorizes; safety has veto, and that ordering is not adjustable by licence.
A withdrawal is never a breach by us, is never a failure of supply, and gives a licensee no claim of any kind.
Withdrawal has one ruled timing and it is exact. No new job starts under a withdrawn permission from the day the withdrawal arrives. A job already running 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. Withdrawal
Reading this as a maker, a kit company or a fleet owner?
Say which one you are. The licence sets the rate and the terms; this page sets out what it is a licence to.