The guild
A messiah has followers. A journeyman has a guild.
I am not looking for an audience. I am looking for the people who will read this, disagree with a piece of it, and build the better version — because that is the only way a network like this stops being one person's work and becomes a thing the profession owns.
Linux won by being ownable — not on kernel benchmarks. FrogNet offers the same trade, one layer up.
Linux gave you a floor no company could rent, revoke, or meter. Then it left you standing on the same surveilled network. FrogNet is the next floor: a network individuals, groups, and companies own outright, with the footprint they expose to the outside world collapsed to nearly nothing.
Nobody joins a movement for semantic compression. Sovereignty is the payload — the performance is just how it gets in the door, and how you afford to run it on hardware you already have.
Four steps, and none of them require trusting me.
The distance between "I'm convinced" and "I built something" is where most projects lose people. So the on-ramp is deliberately short, and every step is something you verify yourself.
Read it from first principles
Two free books. How to Think Like a Frog is the why, in plain English. Magnum Croakus is the build manual — install a node, discover the network, write a handler.
Both books, free →Take the developer licence
Free for development, personal, and community use — no seat count, no evaluation clock. You need the spec to build on the protocol, not permission.
Request the licence →Point one internal service at it
The drop-in is the honest on-ramp: leave your code alone, put your existing services on FrogNet transport, and watch what stops crossing the wire. This is the step that pays the same day.
The two levels of adoption →Then write something that exchanges memory, not messages
Compression is the bridge. The prize is network shared memory — a variable any participant reads or writes, the transient database, and the plumbing you stop writing entirely. That is where FrogNet stops being a faster pipe and becomes a different way to program.
Worked UnREST examples →Ten subsystems. Each one is a seam you could own.
Linux never absorbed contribution as kernel rewrites — it absorbed a driver, a scheduler, a filesystem. FrogNet has the same shape on purpose: ten parts, each doing one job, each improvable without touching the others. A codec person can attack BLDC-1 and never read the election code.
UnREST
The tuple-space layer — freshness classes, authority, scope. Argue for a better convergence rule.
BLDC-1
Structure learning and diffing. New data types derive in; a domain-tuned codec could beat the general one badly.
FNWP-1
Framing, opcodes, sequencing, fan-out. The protocol headed for an open standard.
SotF
The adaptive ladder. The deep-tested path — and the one with the clearest measuring stick.
Transient database
Current-state store on an elected host. Bounded staleness by design — sharpen the boundary.
Elections
Capability scoring and re-election. Where "who decides" gets settled; a better score is a real contribution.
Discovery, repair & tuning
Find, join, heal, optimize. Routing and planning people: this is your seam.
Sensor platform
Any sensor onto the fabric as first-class current state. Widest surface for new device work.
AI platform
Models reading and writing the live shared state directly — the substrate as the pipeline.
HTTP coordination
Ordinary HTTP as the coordination tool, so nodes need no new port anywhere.
Every one of these is specified in the build manual, section by section — those section boundaries are the seams. Read the manual →
Better is demonstrated, not argued.
A falsifiable simulator ships with FrogNet, and it is not just how I validate my own work — it is the impartial ground where your claim gets tested. Pass the same oracles, run the same harness, beat the numbers. No personality contest, no maintainer's opinion, no thread.
That is what makes "I welcome contributions that can prove a better algorithm" a real offer instead of a nice sentence. There is a gate, the gate is public, and it does not care who either of us is.
The engine has a keeper. The protocol does not.
Stated plainly, because a developer deciding whether to invest a year deserves to know exactly what could be taken away from them.
Closed, for now — on purpose
The engine
I hold the reference implementation and steer it, and I'll say without flinching that this is a benevolent-dictator phase. Every project that stayed coherent had a keeper early; committees build piles. One mind held this whole shape, and for now that is why it hangs together.
Open — and going further open
The protocol
The wire is headed for a versioned open standard under the FrogNet Foundation, so it ends up owned by the people who use it — not by me. The thing you'd fear losing is the thing being given away.
"This is an initial implementation. I do not claim it is the best, or even the only, way to solve any or all of the many problems that had to be solved for this to work. What I do claim is that it appears to work, and work both well and correctly. I welcome contributions that can prove a better algorithm, and I want to engage with those developers. Linux has many subsystems; so do I."
— John W. Fawcett, on the postureAnd the honest state of the work
Don't trust me — check it. The books derive it from first principles, the licence is free, the protocol is becoming a public contract, and the simulator lets you falsify me. So here is the part a brochure would leave out: FrogNet is broadly exercised in general, and thinly tested in specifics. The media path is the deep-tested exception — hardened, and on it these ideas bought roughly 9×. If one path does that, the rest is the opportunity. Hardening the specifics is precisely the work I am inviting people into, and I would rather say that now than have you find it later.
The door
One mind can hold a fabric. It takes a guild to harden one.
Take the books, take the licence, run the simulator, and find the seam that annoys you most. Then tell me I'm wrong with a patch — that is the whole invitation, and it is the only one I have.
Or write to me directly — john@fawcettinnovations.com