Business model and roadmap

AIBOS is maintained by a steward company, aibos-tech, and given away as an open standard that any sphere can adopt without handing over control of its own repository. The two facts belong together on purpose: a standard only stays trustworthy if adopting it doesn't mean putting yourself under whoever maintains it.

The steward model

aibos-tech runs its own operations on the same version of the standard anyone else can pull — actually using what it publishes, not just shipping it. Every sphere, including aibos-tech's own, stays sovereign: it chooses its version, chooses when to upgrade, and nothing lands in its repository that it didn't ask for. That boundary is structural, not a policy someone could quietly ignore: one writer per repository, a change from a sphere reaches the master standard only through a review gate, and spheres pick up new releases only by choosing to pull them. The standard's own line for what "compliant" actually means captures the whole relationship: compliance is something you measure, never something injected into you.

Where the revenue comes from

The standard itself is the product, and it stays free and complete on every tier, permanently. Nothing here is gated behind a paywall:

• the Trellis thread system
• the full memory architecture
• every skill
• the nightly health check
• the capability catalog
• the installer

All of it is open source. Revenue comes from two places downstream of that, both optional.

The capability marketplace. The catalog itself is open and free today. Paid capabilities from outside developers, with a share of the revenue flowing back to them, are designed and next in line to be built.

Hosted plans — Cloud Admin and Team. These wrap the open-source standard in a hosted convenience layer: a dashboard for your sphere, nightly reports, conformance monitoring, and, for Team, a shared onboarding flow for more than one person working the same sphere. Running the entire standard yourself stays free and complete without either plan; the plans exist for people who'd rather not run the hosting themselves.

The honest roadmap

What follows isn't a features-coming-soon list dressed up as done. Each item here is something the standard names openly as not yet shipped, alongside what's actually built today.

• English translation of the standard. The real command names — /plasser, /lagre, /samsvar, and the rest — are Norwegian today, because that's the language the standard's authors write in. This documentation explains every command in English as it goes; translating the standard itself is on the roadmap, not done.
• The reusable how-tos memory layer. A layer of memory that gets better at a task over time, not just one that remembers what already happened, is part of the plan for the full memory architecture but isn't built yet. It's explicitly parked for a later phase.
• The secretary agent maturing. The secretary archetype — always on, facing the outside world — is honestly labeled the hardest of the three to get right, because a mistake here costs the most. The safety guardrails around it shipped first; the archetype itself remains early, still catching up to the field-tested confidence the other two already have.
• Threads that span spheres. A Trellis thread today lives inside a single sphere. Letting one thread follow work across multiple spheres is part of the design intent, deliberately held back until a real cross-sphere need shows up in practice, rather than being built ahead of one.
• Capabilities distributed from their own projects. The newer capability protocol already defines this: an add-on living in its own separate project, pinned to one exact version, instead of living inside the standard's own catalog. It's specified but currently dormant, waiting on real outside capability authors before it's worth switching on.
• A paid third-party marketplace, with revenue share. The natural extension of the open catalog: outside developers publishing capabilities for money, with a share of that revenue flowing back to them. Designed, and next in line — not shipped.

What this means in practice

None of this is a secret waiting to be discovered — it's the standard's own account of where it currently stops. What's shipped today is real and in use: a working installer and a nightly audit that actually catches drift, an open capability catalog and a hosted layer for people who want one. What's on the roadmap is named as exactly that, and nothing here claims otherwise.