Licence change
The terms move after adoption.
In 2021 Docker Desktop became paid for organisations above 250 employees or US$10 million revenue. In 2023 Terraform moved to the Business Source Licence. Neither needed the customer’s consent.
Sovereign AI-Native Engineering
The choices we made, and why they matter in a regulated estate.
KR&A’s methodology puts AI agents at the centre of software delivery. We run it on a stack chosen against one rule: nothing the client depends on can be withdrawn, repriced or reached by a foreign court through a decision the client did not make.
The exposure
Three ways a toolchain fails a regulated buyer without anyone touching it.
Jurisdiction
Data residency is not data control.
A provider subject to US law can be compelled under the CLOUD Act to produce data it controls, wherever it is stored. What matters is who can be compelled, not where the server sits.
Model drift
The vendor holds the compliance posture.
A proprietary model can change without notice, and each silent update is a de facto re-certification event. Open weights pinned to a version change only when the client decides.
The test
Two limbs. Both must hold.
Every component was selected against the test KR&A applies in client sovereignty assessments. Domicile alone is insufficient: it records where a company is registered, not where the data goes or who can withdraw the capability.
Limb 1 · Forkability
Forkable under an OSI-approved licence.
The capability must be runnable indefinitely without the vendor. Open core fails where the feature that matters sits behind the commercial gate.
Limb 2 · Runtime control
Jurisdictional control of data flow at runtime.
At execution time, code, prompts, credentials and telemetry traverse only infrastructure in a jurisdiction the client selects. A vendor control plane inside the client’s account fails this limb.
Every choice, and why
One stack, each component replaceable, none of it rented from outside the EU.
| Layer | Choice | Licence | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agent harness | pi | MIT | KR&A’s skills and lifecycle rules are files committed with the code. Any compatible model endpoint plugs in. |
| Agent terminal | TUIOS | MIT | Agents run side by side in persistent sessions, and every request for human approval lands in one inbox. |
| Models | Mistral, GLM-5.2, Qwen | Apache 2.0, MIT | Open weights pinned by version. Movable to self-hosted inference at any time. |
| Inference | Scaleway Generative APIs | Service | Hosted in Paris. Dedicated deployments where single-region processing is required. |
| Cloud | Scaleway | Service | French provider. Compute, PostgreSQL, storage and edge under one EU contract. |
| Edge | Scaleway Edge, DNS | Service | Removes the last US operator from the request path. |
| Source, CI | GitLab, self-hosted | MIT (CE) | Forge, pipelines and registry, run on our own infrastructure inside the estate. |
| Infrastructure | OpenTofu | MPL-2.0 | Linux Foundation fork of Terraform. Same language, open governance. |
| Orchestration | k3s | Apache 2.0 | Lightweight CNCF Kubernetes that runs the same on any provider. |
| Delivery | Flux CD | Apache 2.0 | Every production change is a reviewed commit the cluster pulls. |
| Secrets | OpenBao, ESO | MPL-2.0, Apache 2.0 | One store for platform and developer secrets, injected at runtime. |
| Work tracking | Plane, self-hosted | AGPL-3.0 | System of record for scope, agent activity and decisions. See governed delivery |
| Containers | Colima, Docker Engine | MIT, Apache 2.0 | Drops the proprietary desktop layer, keeps the standard Docker toolchain. |
| Observability | Grafana, Loki, VictoriaMetrics | AGPL-3.0, Apache 2.0 | Logs and metrics stay inside the estate they describe. |
| Workstation | chezmoi dotfiles | MIT | One declared inventory installs every tool and the manifest agents read. |
On model origin
GLM and Qwen are developed in China. Under the test, origin is context rather than verdict. The weights are published under MIT and Apache 2.0, run on infrastructure in Paris operated by a French provider, and send nothing to their developers. Where a client’s policy prefers European-origin models, Mistral takes the primary role and the harness is unchanged, because the model is a configuration value, not an architectural commitment.
Governed delivery
From the outside, an agile project. Underneath, a complete provenance record.
Non-technical stakeholders see what they already know: a backlog, iterations, story points and a board in Plane. They need no new tooling and no new vocabulary to follow progress.
Behind each card, the work item holds the specification, the agent’s plan, every deviation, the verification evidence and the human decision that closed it. The harness enforces this lifecycle through committed rules, not individual discipline.
Work-item lifecycleEnforced by the harness
- 01
Filed
The work item enters the current iteration with an estimate and acceptance criteria. Filing is not authorisation to build.
- 02
Planned
The agent moves the item to In Progress and posts its implementation plan before changing any code. Reviewers diff the result against that plan.
- 03
Logged
Deviations, root causes and discovered constraints are recorded on the item as they occur.
- 04
Evidenced
At In Review the item carries the change reference, pipeline result and verification evidence, including visual confirmation for anything a user sees.
- 05
Closed by a human
No agent moves its own work to Done, even when every check passes.
- Work item
- Branch
- Merge
- Pipeline
- Deploy
- Live
For regulated environments
The evidence comes out of delivery, not a separate exercise.
| Obligation | What the process produces |
|---|---|
| DORA, ICT third-party risk | Every component is forkable with a documented substitute, which gives exit strategies substance rather than intent. |
| NIS2, supply-chain security | A declared toolchain inventory, digest-pinned images and a single path from commit to production. |
| Cyber Resilience Act | Traceability from requirement to released change, recorded as a by-product of normal delivery. |
| EU AI Act, Article 4 | A defined operating model in which named people supervise agents and own every decision to ship. |
These map the evidence the process generates. They are not legal advice and not a compliance opinion. Confirm obligations with counsel.
Status
We run on it first.
KR&A’s own platform is the reference implementation. It is migrating from a US hyperscaler stack to the components above, and the migration is itself run through this process, with every step recorded in Plane.
Engagement
Assessment first.
We baseline your development toolchain against the sovereignty test and give you time to absorb the result. It converts into a scoped pilot on one workstream, then training and adoption, with no upfront commitment beyond the assessment.