PRODUCT_BOUNDARY

Product Boundary — OSS vs Commercial

HELM ships as two products. This document defines the boundary.

HELM OSS — The Execution Kernel

License: Apache 2.0 (permanent)

Everything needed for a single team to govern AI agent tool execution:

Component What it does
Governed proxy OpenAI-compatible reverse proxy with receipt emission
MCP interceptor Governed MCP server (stdio + HTTP + SSE)
Guardian PEP Fail-closed policy evaluation with PRG
Conformance runner L1/L2/L3 conformance verification
Signed receipts Ed25519 signed, causal-chained (Lamport)
ProofGraph DAG Append-only evidence graph with causal ordering
EvidencePack export Deterministic .tar.gz, offline-verifiable
Verify CLI Air-gapped bundle verification
Policy bundles Load, verify, compose, test policy packs
WASI sandbox Gas/time/memory bounded execution
Approval ceremonies Timelock + challenge/response
Trust registry Event-sourced key management
SDKs TypeScript, Python, Go, Rust, Java
CI boundary checks Reusable GitHub Actions workflow

Nothing security-critical or runtime-essential is paywalled.

HELM Commercial — Organizational Coordination

License: Proprietary

Everything needed for organizations with multiple teams, compliance requirements, or fleet management:

Component What it does
Policy workspace UI Author, review, and version policies visually
Multi-user approvals Delegated responsibility with audit trail
Staged rollout Shadow mode, canary, progressive policy deploys
Org-wide registry Policy distribution across teams and services
Tenant management Workspace isolation, configuration hierarchy
SSO / SCIM / RBAC Enterprise identity and access management
Trust federation Cross-org trust chain management
Long-term retention Legal hold, export governance, compliance archives
Fleet visibility Dashboards across many agents/services
Incident workflows Audit dashboards, change review, escalation
Billing & metering Usage tracking, quotas, administration
Managed control plane Cloud/hybrid hosted runtime management

The Principle

Give away the execution kernel. Sell organizational coordination around many kernels.

The open-source runtime must be irrational to replace. The commercial layer makes it operationally manageable at scale.