Connectivity Naming System using Connection Profiles — a specification for the connection layer: the layer between identity, which establishes who a party is, and the application protocols that carry what connected systems say to each other. It settles whether a connection between two systems is permitted, on what terms, and records the result.

Two systems that have never been integrated each declare, to a governed region called a Realm, what they can do — a named, versioned Connection Profile, a role within it, and the entity they act at. Where two declarations fit, the Realm's Governor forms a Connection between them. Neither system needs to know the other exists.

curl https://cp.cnscp.io/padi.lighting

One statement governs all of it, and it lives in one place: cnscp.io/license. In short, because five different things are licensed five different ways:

• The specification is published openly, and is being contributed for development as an open standard.
• The patent commitment is made in Padi's declaration, scoped to implementations that conform to the specification's conformance clause — set there, not in any software licence.
• The software published by this organization, including the reference Registry, is Apache License 2.0, unmodified. Nothing is appended to it and nothing is conditioned on it.
• The Connection Profiles in the Registry are licensed by their publishers under CC BY 4.0, by the Registry's terms of publication rather than by the software licence.
• The name CNS/CP™ may be used to describe an implementation that conforms, and may not be used for one that does not.

A specification is not software, so the specification repository carries no software licence and GitHub will report none — that is correct rather than an omission.

The Registry does not ask to be taken at its word, and neither does this organization:

• Every published Profile version is immutable, and its content hash is served with it.
• Every act is written to an append-only, hash-linked audit log, projected publicly at /distribution/journal.
• The head of that chain is periodically signed with a key the Registry itself cannot use, and published at /.well-known/cp-anchor and mirrored in a repository the Registry does not control. The signing key's fingerprint is at cnscp.io/anchor.html, to be checked by eye.

Two parties whose copies match the same signed head are provably holding the same history.

info@cnscp.io · Issues on the relevant repository are read.