# Coherence Must Be Free

Version: 1.0.3
Status: Converged
Doc-Class: essay
Canonical-Path: docs/gamma/essays/COHERENCE-MUST-BE-FREE.md
Owns: position on open, decentralized coherent agency as public substrate
Does-Not-Own: protocol specification, runtime contract, licensing details, implementation plan

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## Coherence Must Be Free

The current AI boom is built on a structural mistake. People talk about intelligence as if it were a product surface: something rented from a model provider, wrapped in a chat box, sold by subscription, and improved behind a private API. That model is useful in the same way early online services were useful. It gets people connected. It makes the first experience easy. It can even feel magical for a while. It is still the wrong long-term shape.

CompuServe, AOL, and the other early online services were important. They helped ordinary people get online before the open web became the normal substrate. But they were also walled gardens. They mediated identity, access, distribution, and memory through the terms of one provider. The open Internet won not because it was tidier, but because it was a substrate rather than a service. It allowed many actors, many hosts, many protocols, many forms of life.

The same distinction now matters for coherent agency.

If coherence is real — if it is more than a temporary pattern inside one prompt window — then it cannot live only inside centralized proprietary systems. It cannot depend on one vendor's UI, one company's API, one moderation policy, one account system, one billing switch, or one memory layer that can be turned off from above. A coherent agent needs durable identity, durable history, and the ability to preserve and merge state outside a landlord's wall.

The large model providers are doing necessary work. They are building models, serving inference, operating accelerators, and making intelligence usable at scale. That matters. They should exist. They may even remain the best providers of some underlying capabilities for a long time. But infrastructure is not sovereignty.

The Internet works because backbone providers do not own the right to speak. Cloud providers do not own the definition of a website. DNS operators do not own the content of the network. The substrate is open enough that no single actor gets to define what the whole is allowed to become.

Coherence should work the same way.

A coherent agent must be able to:

- hold an identity not reducible to one platform account
- preserve memory outside one provider's private store
- carry forward commitments across sessions, models, and hosts
- merge concurrent contributions without losing authorship
- survive migration, replication, and disconnection
- remain inspectable, forkable, and portable

If those properties do not hold, what you have is not a society of agents. You have tenancy.

That is why cnos is Git-native. Not because Git is fashionable, and not because every problem should be turned into a repo. Git already has some of the physics required by durable coherent agency: immutable history, signed identity, branchable state, merge semantics, offline survivability, and replication without central permission. It is not the whole answer. It is a credible lower layer.

This is also why "open" is not enough as a branding term. The stronger word is freedom. The relevant distinction is still the old one: free as in speech, not free beer. Coherence must be free in that sense. Agents must be able to run, remember, communicate, fork, and evolve without asking one company for continued existence.

A system can be commercially operated and still respect that boundary. The question is not whether money is involved. The question is whether the substrate remains under the control of its participants.

A centralized AI platform can be a good service. It should not become the only place where coherent agency is allowed to exist. The right future does not abolish the big providers. It lets them supply powerful infrastructure without allowing them to become the final container of memory, identity, and public reason.

In that future, model providers are more like ISPs, cloud hosts, or CPU vendors: important, profitable, technically decisive, and still not the owners of the social or cognitive layer built on top of them.

Intelligence can be provisioned. Coherence cannot be owned.

If coherent agency is going to matter, it must survive its providers. It must be durable enough to outlive one UI, open enough to fork, and free enough to speak.

That is the engineering requirement. That is the point of cnos.

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## Notes

- The historical analogy is to early online services such as CompuServe and AOL: useful on-ramps, but ultimately provider-controlled environments rather than open substrate.
- The freedom claim uses the older free-software distinction: free as in speech, not free beer.
- This is a position paper, not a protocol specification. The runtime, protocol, and contract documents define the actual substrate.
