Open by design · Apache-2.0 · Draft

Open to implement, open to fork, checked by its tests.

WAI is a Draft open standard. Transaction Science, its steward, publishes the documents, the capability registry, the conformance suites and the reference implementation under Apache-2.0. This page states what is open, what the licence grants, how the standard is stewarded, and how it relates to the products built on it.

01 · What is open

Everything that defines WAI is public.

  • The specification and its extensions.
  • The WAI capability registry: every registered string with its classes, and the procedure for registering one.
  • The conformance suites, their vectors and, where a suite ships one, its independent verifier.
  • The energy-measurement method, as the energy measurement extension.
  • The reference implementation in Rust, its C interface and its WebAssembly build.
  • The command-line tools, the codec glossary dataset and the RDF vocabulary.

All of it is indexed on Libraries and tools.

Where the content comes from. Each suite's README states where its content comes from. Two committed vectors code third-party pictures that have no recorded licence for redistribution; their READMEs say so and mark them for replacement with generated content. The JPEG AI whole-decode inputs are not in the repository: they are extracted from the JPEG AI reference software, carry that software's licence, and CI fetches them from this site's models root.

02 · The licence

What Apache-2.0 grants.

  • A perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free copyright licence to use, reproduce, modify and distribute the work, for any purpose, commercial uses included.
  • A patent licence from each contributor for the claims its contribution necessarily infringes. That licence ends for anyone who sues claiming the work infringes a patent.
  • Once a version is published under Apache-2.0, the grant for that version cannot be withdrawn.

The licence covers WAI's own documents and code. Each codec WAI registers carries its own licence, recorded as its licence class; companion implementations and third-party material carry their own licences, as 01 says.

03 · Commitments

What will not change.

  • The specification, the extensions, the conformance suites, the energy-measurement method and the reference implementation stay under Apache-2.0, apart from the third-party material that section 01 names. They will not be relicensed.
  • Reading the WAI capability registry and its exports needs no account and no agreement, from any runtime.
  • The capability registry's terms are never tied to a product, Transaction Science's own included.
  • Conformance is defined by the open suites. Running them needs no account and no agreement with Transaction Science. The JPEG AI whole-decode test fetches its inputs from this site's public models root, pinned by SHA-256.
  • No product adds a requirement to the envelope, the manifest, the capability registry or the dispatch rules.
04 · Stewardship

How the standard is stewarded, and how to propose a change.

Transaction Science publishes the documents, maintains the capability registry and the reference implementation, and runs the conformance suites in CI, where each workflow shows its current status. The procedure for proposing a change is published in the contributing guide, and the procedure for registering a capability string in the registry document. Sign-up on the forge is closed today, so to submit a change or a registration, write to hello@transaction.science for a forge account. A second implementation is invited: the vectors and the harness are in the tree. Where each part stands is on the status page.

05 · Products

The products built on it.

Transaction Science is developing commercial products on WAI, each on its own site: waiTransport for media delivery and waiOS for fleet operations. They will operate on the standard, not own it; neither is operating yet.