Sets and series.
Most work needs more than one way of working. Under our licence from Even Steven we may offer several named skills together under one paper — assembled for a job, or running from one name across more than one machine. Licensing them together never merges them.
A set is a shelf, not a stew.
When several skills are licensed together, what is combined is the paper and the price. What is never combined is the objects. Every member of a set remains its own registry entry, held under its own name, built only from the sessions one person consented to. Every member is chosen by name before the work it does. Every member runs its own meter. Every member is attributed to the person it came from, and ended by that person alone.
Nothing is averaged. Nothing is fitted together. Nothing is trained on the members to produce a seventh thing that is the set. We do not license a blend, and a set is not one.
If you buy a set of six, you are buying six things that arrived in one envelope. You are not buying a seventh thing made out of the six. When one of the six ends, you have five, and the five are exactly what they were the day before.
Assembled for a job, or running from one name.
Both are several entries under one paper. They differ in what holds them together, and that difference is commercial rather than technical.
Several names, chosen for the work
The skills a particular job actually needs, licensed as one arrangement. A site that runs three families of machine and wants a named way of working on each of them is licensing a set. So is a contractor who wants two different hands available on the same machine for two different kinds of task, and will choose between them at the start of each one.
The members do not have to come from the same person, the same employer, or the same part of the country. They have to be the right ones for the work.
One thread, running through several entries
Entries that belong together because something runs through them. Most often that is one person across more than one family of machine — a hand who is worth having on the excavator is frequently worth having on the dozer, and those are two entries, not one.
A series can also follow a kind of work through the machines it touches, so that a licensee takes the whole progression rather than picking its way through the list.
Whose choice it is. Tacit Source holds a licence from Even Steven to market either individual skills or sets and series, and which of those is offered in a given case is our decision. What is never our decision is whether a person's skill is in it: that is theirs, it is given one permission at a time, and it is ended the same way. The four consents
The paper changes. The objects do not.
| One skill | A set or series | |
|---|---|---|
| The paper | One licence, one entry. | One licence covering several entries, each listed by name on its face. |
| The price | Set for that entry, in the licence. | Priced as its members. A set is an arrangement over several rates, not a single rate for a merged thing. Lose a member and the price is the members that remain. |
| Selection at the machine | Chosen by name before the work starts. | Identical. One member is chosen by name before each piece of work. A set does not run as a set; its members run one at a time, like any other skill. |
| The count | One meter, on the hours that entry ran. | Identical, once per member. Each member meters its own hours off its own signed rows. An invoice may add them up; the rows underneath it never merge. |
| Attribution | To the person the entry came from. | Identical, per member. No hour is ever attributed to a set. Every hour belongs to one name. |
| Withdrawal | That person ends theirs. | Identical, per member. One person ending theirs removes one member. It does not touch the others and it is not a breach by us. |
What actually happens when somebody in a set stops.
This is the question a buyer should ask first, so here is the answer before it is asked.
Fig. 1 — A set, with one member withdrawn. The rules between entries are boundaries, not decoration: nothing crosses them.
That member stops at once
No new job starts under it from the day notice arrives. A job already underway finishes, because stopping a machine mid-pass is its own hazard. That is the one delay in it, and neither we nor a licensee can extend it.
The rest of the set is untouched
The other members keep running, keep metering and keep paying, exactly as they did the day before. There is no rebuild, no revalidation, and no period during which the set is unavailable, because the set was never a single object that had to be taken apart.
It is not a breach, and it is not a claim
A person ending theirs is not a failure of supply and gives a licensee no claim of any kind — not for the job it could not finish, not for the customer it had to tell. A licensee prices its business knowing that. Withdrawal
The thing we will not sell, and the reason.
The obvious commercial move is to take many people's work and fit it together into one general model. It is cheaper to build and easier to sell. We do not do it, and the reason is not squeamishness.
Per-use payment to a named person works exactly where that person's contribution stays a selectable, addressable artefact. The one deployed scheme anywhere that pays named contributors per use works for precisely that reason: what the contributor gave is the thing the buyer selects. Once a contribution is one of millions dissolved into a general model's parameters, the configuration that made counting possible is gone, and with it the count.
Withdrawal fails in the same place and harder. Checking, from a delivered model, that one person's influence has been removed is not an engineering task awaiting better tools — it is formally unavailable from the artefact. Unlearning is not a property of a model; it is a property of a history, and histories are attested, not measured. A right to withdraw that cannot be honoured in a way the person can act on is a promise that will be broken.
So a blend would require us to make two of the promises on this site and keep neither. A set keeps both, for every member, by not creating the problem. How separability is held
Four things a buyer asks about sets.
Can a set run two skills at once on one machine?
No. A machine runs one named way of working at a time, selected before the work starts. A set makes several available to choose between; it does not make them run together, and it does not switch between them on its own.
Does a bigger set get a better rate?
A set is an arrangement over several rates and the licence sets them. What a set never does is turn several rates into one rate for a merged thing, because there is no merged thing to price.
Can a member be added later?
Yes, by adding an entry to the paper. The added entry arrives on the same terms as every other — chosen by name, metered on its own, ended by the person it came from.
Do the people in a set know who else is in it?
A person's consent to be held alongside others is separate from their consent to be recorded, and it is given and ended on its own. What a set is composed of is a commercial matter between the licensee and us; it is not a way of publishing anybody.
Working out whether you need one name or several?
Tell us what the job is, and how many kinds of work it actually takes.