License
A licence names one number and pins one edition.
Steady Eddie and Strategic Agent require skill sets. Even Steven owns them. Tacit Tessera licenses them to OEMs and to AI. A skill set is licensed, never sold: the paper names the number, pins the edition, and states what the register stands behind. Nothing has been licensed — every entry in the Book reads Specified.
Hands · by the hour
A Hands licence runs by the hour, under the person's name. The person is chosen by name before the work starts — no default, no last-used — and that person can end it.
Collected by Steady Eddie with the Trainer, a kit in a case, wired to nothing. Owned by Even Steven, which holds the consent and the agreement. The rate lives on Even Steven's covenant, not here.
Machine · by the machine
A Machine licence runs by the machine. One taught way of working covers one family of machine, and it too is chosen before the work starts. It proposes. It never authorizes.
Supplied and collected by Steady Eddie, a division of Sustainable Infrastructure Group Ltd., and licensed through Tacit Tessera like the rest. No capture session has been recorded, nothing has been metered and nobody has been paid.
Records · by tier
A Records licence runs by tier: Consult, Apply or Reference. What a tier licenses is access and work — never the pile. Secrecy keeps a reference licensable.
Collected by Strategic Agent, which captures the skill set of a professional from the corpus they retained over a career and mined into a reference. Owned by Even Steven.
Two kinds of Source file on the Records track, and the professional comes first. A named person's practice, where the Source is the person, named on the Card. A company's records, where the Source is the company, coded and never named. Either kind signs with Even Steven; what is brought and what is never taken is on Bring your records.
Licensees are of two kinds: an OEM — a maker, a kit company, a fleet owner, a business running a machine — and an AI: a platform, an agent builder, a command centre running a Records set. Both get a numbered, sealed edition, a count of every use, and the seal check.
A file can be copied and its label stripped; a served reference cannot, because every answer carries its citations and enforcement lives at the point of serving. A numbered edition served under licence is the product; a copied file is only a key.
C H 3 001 MN · Marnie Thivierge — Dozer, mining EXAMPLE
Construction · Hands · collected by Steady Eddie · owned by Even Steven · Specified
Asked for by name, on one family of machine, counted by the hour it is in use. No capture session has ever been recorded, so this names a specification, not an event.
A sector letter leads every number, and the tile carries the mark of the house that collected the skill set — never the owner's.
A licence pins an edition
A number names a skill set. A number and an edition name one frozen version of it. A licence carries both, because a pinned edition is what makes a result repeatable: run against it today or in five years and it behaves the same way, or the register says why not.
An edition is sealed when it is frozen, and its seal can be checked. A check answers four things and nothing else — whether the number was typed correctly, whether the register knows it, its status, and whether this edition is current.
On the Hands track, and on a Records set built from a named person's practice, the number never replaces the name. The name leads on the paper; the number sits beside it.
A licence prints the number in both forms.
tacittessera.com/verify/OR1001GN26
| Tier | What is licensed | The refusal that comes with it |
|---|---|---|
| Consult | A composed answer citing its sources by seat, document code and anchor, quoting short passages only, giving figures as bands over many jobs. | It refuses when the records do not support an answer, and no single job's figure is ever served. |
| Apply | A work product the customer saves as their own document — an estimate sheet carrying a band, coded comparables, risk flags, assumptions and sources. Sign-off stays with the customer. | It declines when there are not enough comparable jobs to price the work without exposing one. |
| Reference | A pack for an agreed scope, from contributors who opted in to that tier, with return-or-destroy against a certificate, and audit rights. | It covers the agreed scope and nothing beyond it, and a contributor's records never build anyone's model. |
A Records licence is made of five things: the seat, the reference, updates, verification and support. No tier is offered while an entry reads Specified, and every entry reads Specified today.
A pooled seat is a Mosaic
A crew, a yard or a head office rarely needs one number. A Mosaic gathers several under one licence; the paper is one, and what sits under it stays plural.
That is what a pooled Records seat is: a Mosaic of per-contributor sets, each keeping its own number, edition, count and withdrawal. A contributor who ends it ends their own; the rest of the shelf stands.
A set is a shelf, not a stew. Nothing gathered under one paper is folded into anything else, because a skill set folded into another can no longer be counted, named or ended on its own.
What the certificate carries
- Licensee, and whether an OEM or an AI
- Skill set, by name
- Tacit Tessera number, in both forms
- Edition pinned, and the date it was pinned
- Collected by, and owned by Even Steven
- Tier
- Term
- Two signature blocks — the register and the house holding the consent
- The seal line
One sheet, and it says what it is
A certificate is a register entry printed on paper. It names one skill set and the edition it pins, carries the tile, and ends with the seal line — where the holder checks that this is the Card that was sealed.
It carries no rate and no figure. What is owed is worked out from the count, on Meter. The sheets, the deck and the operator's card are on Cards, stamped EXAMPLE.
The money owed
The hour billed and the hour paid are the same row.
The count
Every hour in use, and every serve from a Records set, counted at source and checkable from both ends.
The ending
On Hands and Machine: It stops for new work at once; a job already underway finishes. On Records a withdrawal takes effect at the next serve.
And what we do not
Not the machine. Not the job. Not the output. Those are the licensee's, and nothing here is part of a safety case.
Two dates follow a withdrawal and are never collapsed into one: the out-of-service date, when the job already underway has finished and nothing runs it anywhere; and the true date, when every copy is gone, backups included.
All of it turns on one condition. A right to end a licence can be honoured in a database, a retrieval index, a small model, and anything kept separately addressable. It cannot be honoured, in any way a second party can check, in a large generative model built the ordinary way. Separability is not a feature here; it is the condition on which every other promise can be kept.
Next
Read a Card, then check its seal.
Every entry in the Tacit Tessera Book carries the scope a licence would name, the edition history it would pin, and the tiers it would be offered under. Verify answers the four questions and nothing else.