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ADR-0008: Private and Proprietary Default

Status

proposed — decided during initial drafting; not yet formally ratified by a human review checkpoint.

Date

2026-07-10

Context

This repository was created without an open-source license and without a public remote. Devonshire Digital LLC's business — a proprietary product portfolio spanning ventures like Shelfery and Digital Products — does not currently call for open distribution of its governance documentation, specifications, or (eventually) implementation code. Leaving licensing and visibility undecided by default is itself a decision with consequences (an unlicensed public repository, for instance, creates legal ambiguity), so an explicit default was set rather than left implicit.

Decision

The repository is private and proprietary by default: no open-source license is applied, no public remote is configured, and NOTICE.md carries a provisional proprietary notice. This default holds unless a different decision (e.g., open-sourcing a specific component, publishing specific documentation publicly) is explicitly approved later through the normal decision process.

Consequences

  • All content in this repository is treated as proprietary and confidential to Devonshire Digital LLC unless and until a specific, explicit decision states otherwise for specific content.
  • No content should be pushed to a public remote or shared outside the company without checking whether that content has been explicitly cleared for external sharing.
  • The precise terms of the proprietary notice (scope, exceptions, formal legal language) are not fully settled — this is tracked as an open question in docs/governance/open-questions.md rather than treated as resolved by this ADR.
  • If a future decision opens part of the repository (e.g., a specific template or standard released publicly), that decision should itself be recorded as a new ADR rather than assumed from this one.

Alternatives Considered

  • Open-source by default. Rejected: the company's ventures are commercial products; there is no current business or philosophical case for defaulting to open distribution of governance documentation or product specifications, and doing so would require legal and licensing decisions not yet made.
  • Leave licensing/visibility undecided (no explicit default). Rejected: an undecided default is itself risky — an unlicensed, ambiguous repository invites confusion for anyone who later gains access to it, and provides no clear proprietary notice in the meantime.

Follow-up Actions

  • NOTICE.md
  • docs/governance/open-questions.md

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