Project
About evo, the actor taxonomy, license posture, and how to participate.
About evo
Evo is a reaction. The maintainer spent years shipping appliance-class devices on stacks designed for something else: web runtimes pressed into service as embedded backends, applications accumulating shared mutable state until race conditions became the default behaviour, release cycles measured in months because every change had to ship together. Each platform had a clean concept and execution that could not keep up. The user felt it as the device becoming worse over time. The maintainer felt it as fear of the next change.
Evo is the system the maintainer built to do it differently. Pure Rust, no garbage collector, no JavaScript runtime on the device, no PHP backend, no shell pipelines holding state. One long-running steward process is the sole authority on every transition; plugins never address each other; the catalogue is data; every piece is independently versioned and signed; the operator has the final word on local trust.
The framework is pre-1.0. The audio reference generic device exists and is the canonical demonstration of every framework function. Vendor distributions are an open invitation, not yet announced. Single-maintainer driven; open to contributions on the contracts the engineering documents name.
Actors
Five positions in the evo ecosystem. Each owns part of the supply chain.
| Position | Role |
|---|---|
| Evo project | Maintains the steward, fabric, SDK, tooling. Signs the framework binaries and the brand-neutral plugin commons. |
| Reference generic device | Curates a brand-neutral plugin set for one domain (audio, video, home, instrument, etc.). Plugins live under org.evoframework.*. |
| Vendor | Commercial or organisational entity that signs plugins under a claimed namespace (com.<vendor>.*) with formal commitments. |
| Individual author | Person or small team signing plugins under their own name. |
| Operator | The person running the device. Sole authority on local trust and revocation. |
The full actor taxonomy, vendor contract, and namespace governance are in VENDOR_CONTRACT.md.
License
The framework runtime in evo-core is licensed under the Business Source License 1.1. The plugin SDK, the operator CLI, the trust primitive, the proc macro, and the example plugins are licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. The reference generic devices (evo-device-<domain>) and any vendor distributions are Apache 2.0. The evo-catalogue-schemas repository is Apache 2.0. This website is Apache 2.0.
The licence text lives in each repository's LICENSE file. The Apache licence does not grant rights to use the project's trademarks; trademarks are governed separately.
Trademark
evo and evoframework are trademarks of Just a Nerd. Factual reference, accurate compatibility statements, educational and editorial use, and fair-use commentary are explicitly permitted without prior permission. Branding products, naming domains, and deceptive use suggesting affiliation are not.
The full trademark policy is in TRADEMARK.md at the root of this site's repository, and is published at the root of every public evo-* repository.
Contribute
Contributions are welcomed on the contracts the engineering documents name: plugin contract additions, new shelf shapes in the catalogue schemas, new reference generic devices for new domains, new vendor distributions, documentation improvements, and the website itself.
Issues and pull requests live on each repository's GitHub page. The top-level org for browsing every repository at once is github.com/foonerd. Contributions are accepted under the Developer Certificate of Origin (https://developercertificate.org/); commits should carry a Signed-off-by: trailer.
For trademark permission requests outside the explicitly-permitted uses, open an issue at the canonical project repository titled [trademark] followed by a brief description of the proposed use.
Status
The project's current state, in plain terms:
- The framework runtime, the plugin SDK, the operator CLI, the client protocol, and the catalogue schemas all exist and are released as tagged versions on GitHub.
- The audio reference generic device exists and ships four brand-neutral plugins (MPD playback, ALSA composition, file-tag metadata, local artwork) signed by the evo project's commons signing key.
- Vendor distributions are an open invitation. The framework, the reference generic device, and the catalogue schemas are stable contracts that any vendor can adopt; no specific vendor adoption is announced yet.
- The website you are reading is itself pre-1.0 scaffolding; content lands as it is written.
Each repository's README.md and CHANGELOG.md carry the precise current state.