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Open and Enterprise, compared
They share ideas and no code. The differences are not a feature list, they are two answers to one question: who is trusted?
The question that decides everything
Open assumes nobody is. There is no operator, no membership, no identity worth having, so the design spends its effort on making the middle of the pipeline blind: encrypted hops, activations rather than text, layers kept on your own machine.
Enterprise assumes the organisation running it is trusted, and that it will have to prove what it did. So the design spends its effort on identity, authorisation and an audit trail, and the machines are known rather than anonymous.
Neither is a better version of the other. A network of strangers cannot have an audit trail, because there is nobody with standing to read one and no way to attribute an action to a person. An organisation's cluster must have one, because somebody will eventually ask.
Side by side
| Open | Enterprise | |
|---|---|---|
| Who runs the machines | volunteers, anywhere | one organisation, its own hardware |
| Who is trusted | nobody | the organisation's own operators |
| Membership | anyone, anonymously | an identity issued by a coordinator |
| Transport | X25519 and ChaCha20-Poly1305, no authority | mutual TLS 1.3, identity from the certificate |
| Discovery | signed gossip | a coordinator that places deliberately |
| Availability | whoever happens to be online | machines an operator enrolled |
| Placement | the slice the network needs most | an estimate that refuses rather than crashes |
| Fine-tuning | no | LoRA adapters, with provenance |
| Distillation | no | teacher and student on the same cluster |
| Audit | none, by design | every action and every refusal |
| Entitlement | none | a signed licence, checked offline |
| Console | none | a web interface for operators |
| Support | the issue tracker | a commercial agreement |
| Licence | AGPL-3.0 | proprietary |
What Enterprise took from Open
The idea that a model can be cut by layer and run as a pipeline across machines that were never meant to hold it. That is the load-bearing insight and it came from the open project.
Everything below it was rewritten. Enterprise is a Rust control plane with a Python worker behind a versioned gRPC contract, mutual TLS everywhere, an identity system, an audit trail and a placement engine that refuses. None of that code is shared, and the licences would not permit it if it were.
What Open has that Enterprise does not
Anonymity. Enterprise knows exactly which machine did what, on purpose. That is the feature an auditor wants and the opposite of what a volunteer network offers.
Reach. Open can use a machine anywhere in the world without anybody provisioning it. Enterprise reaches the machines an operator enrolled and no others, also on purpose.