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FCC Stance — Ecosystem Best-Practices Charter v1.1.0

Status: Stance / awareness note. Not a charter-adoption acknowledgment, and not a structural integration.

This document records FCC's position on the Research-Center-authored Ecosystem Best-Practices Charter following its v1.1.0 amendment. It exists so the FCC posture is unambiguous and so future maintainers do not mistakenly file a charter-adoption PR (FCC is out of adoption scope — see §1).


1. FCC is the FCC-framework authority, not a charter adopter

FCC owns and defines the FCC framework and the R.I.S.C.E.A.R. specification (see CLAUDE.mdCanonical Authority). The Ecosystem Best-Practices Charter is a separate, Research-Center-authored governance artifact that codifies operating standards for the ecosystem's service/sibling partners.

The charter's own target_partners list is: PAOM, Skyparlour, AOME, CONSTEL, CTO, AI-COE, Research Center. FCC is deliberately not on that list. RC's own §5.1 charter-adoption matrix records this explicitly:

RC PR #159 (chore(docs): refresh §5.1 charter adoption matrix, merged 2026-05-04): "…(FCC is charter source, not adopter — out of §5.1 scope)"

RC's ECOSYSTEM_REFERENCE.md further classifies FCC as authority tier: "authority publishes contracts that others pin (FCC for the framework; NEXUS for the three ecosystem registries)."

The two authorities are non-overlapping: RC authors the ecosystem best-practices charter; FCC authors the FCC framework contract. Neither adopts the other.

Consequence: FCC does not create a feat/charter-adoption-* branch or a docs/charter-adoption.md. That pattern is reserved for downstream adopters (ICE ice_ext#11, IRIS l2_iris_ext#1, ATLAS l2_siis_ext#39 — all currently open against charter v1.0.0). Using it for FCC would mis-signal FCC as a subordinate adopter.


2. What charter v1.1.0 changed

Authoritative source: RC ADR-019 (ADR-019-charter-v110-license-isolation.md, Accepted, 2026-05-12, RC-MP-07 Stage 4 F-218, plan recursive-pearl-cascade).

2026-05-12 — v1.0.0 → v1.1.0 (RC-MP-07 Stage 4 F-218, ADR-019): added Standard #7 — License Isolation per the CONSTEL S15 ask. Scope narrowed per L4 (other CONSTEL RT-15 patterns deferred to v1.2.0+ candidates). Charter authority remains Research Center.

Standard #7 is the only net-new content (four other CONSTEL patterns are merely future-flagged for v1.2.0+). It is a 5-rule License Isolation Playbook:

  1. copyleft / restrictive-license functionality ships as opt-in extras only;
  2. such extras are lazy-imported, never imported at package top level;
  3. the MIT-licensed baseline must remain fully functional without any extra;
  4. provide a non-copyleft fallback path where feasible;
  5. last resort: a stub that degrades gracefully with a clear message.

Release note: charter v1.1.0 is now tagged in RC v3.4.0 (RC-MP-07 close, 2026-05-12 — ADR-019 / Standard #7). FCC re-vendored RC's ecosystem registry from the v3.4.0 tag and bumped namespace_registry.yaml's research_center pin 3.3.0 → 3.4.0 in FCC v1.8.2. No FCC code/dep action is implied (see §3 — MIT, no copyleft hard-deps).


3. Why no FCC action is required

FCC already satisfies the intent of Standard #7 by construction:

  • FCC ships under MIT with no copyleft hard-dependencies. Core deps are pyyaml, jsonschema, click, jinja2, python-dotenv (all permissive).
  • Every heavy / optionally-restrictive capability is already an opt-in extra with lazy imports: notebooks, streamlit, search (sentence-transformers, numpy), knowledge (rdflib), protocols (websockets), observability (opentelemetry-*), the CTO bridge — see CLAUDE.mdDependencies and pyproject.toml [project.optional-dependencies].
  • The MIT baseline (pip install fcc-agent-team-ext) is fully functional with zero extras — rules 1–3 of the playbook are met as-is.

No code change, no dependency change, and no packaging change is needed for FCC to be consistent with charter v1.1.0. This note is the FCC-side record of that determination.


4. Provenance

Fact Source
FCC out of charter §5.1 adoption scope RC PR #159 (merged 2026-05-04)
FCC = authority tier RC ECOSYSTEM_REFERENCE.md
Charter v1.1.0 = Standard #7 License Isolation RC ADR-019 (2026-05-12, RC-MP-07 F-218)
v1.1.0 tagged in RC v3.4.0 (RC-MP-07 close, 2026-05-12) RC git tag v3.4.0
Trio adoption PRs (downstream pattern, not FCC) ice_ext#11, l2_iris_ext#1, l2_siis_ext#39

Forensic correction: the multi-stage plan attributed charter v1.1.0 to RC PRs

161/#162. That is inaccurate — #161 only primed a charter evaluation that

resolved to DEFER, and #162 is unrelated. Charter v1.1.0 was authored later in RC-MP-07 via ADR-019. This note reflects the corrected provenance.