About
Turning tribal knowledge into a system
MOS exists to turn what lives in experienced people's heads into something shared, structured and reusable: an open system that tells you what to produce, in what order, and gives you the skills to produce it.
01
Who it is for
Three audiences, served by the same system but not by the same release. Founders are the center of gravity for the first year — they have the sharpest pain and the least support.
Founders and first hires
Need to know what to produce and in what order, with nobody to ask. They get the lifecycle map, the context standard, and skills that produce real deliverables.
Early-career professionals
Need to understand why the work is done this way, not just what to fill in. They get the education layer, plus the chance to build and be credited.
Subject-matter experts
Need to execute familiar tasks faster. They get skills that draft from their company's own context instead of from scratch.
All three work the same way: your own files, a skill, and an AI that can work in your files.
02
Principles
Eight commitments that decide what ships and what does not.
01 Unaffiliated
MOS belongs to no consultancy, vendor or service provider. No skill is a sales funnel, and that applies to the founder too.
02 Context first
A skill that cannot read a company's own information is a chatbot with a template. Context is the product.
03 Whole lifecycle
Technical, clinical, regulatory and commercial. Most existing resources cover one slice; the gaps between slices are where projects actually fail.
04 AI-agnostic
Skills are plain Markdown, so any AI that can read and write files in a folder can run them. They are designed and tested on Claude first; where one fails on another runtime, that is a bug in the skill.
05 Your data stays yours
Context lives in your own folder. Nothing company-specific goes into the public repository, ever.
06 No self-promotion
Contribute expertise, not marketing. Credit is given generously; advertising is not.
07 Use at your own risk
MOS encodes good practice drawn from public standards and guidance. Every output must be reviewed and approved by qualified people at your company. MOS is not a regulatory consultant.
08 Opinionated where it matters
A system that accepts every preference becomes medtech soup. The architecture has a final decision-maker.
These hold because the people using MOS enforce them. Skills get built where a member has the problem now, and no skill is built until three people commit to running it on real work.
03
Governance and licensing
Deliberately lightweight: no lawyers, no contributor paperwork, no bureaucracy. The intent is a system with a coherent spine, not a committee.
Roles
Contributor submits a skill, template, improvement or test report. Maintainer owns one skill and is named on it. Domain lead owns a lane of the lifecycle map.
Final say
Three things need a single decision-maker: the lifecycle map, the context standard and the skill format. That call sits with Eric Sugalski, who started MOS. Everything else is open — maintainers own the skills, domain leads own the lanes.
Content
CC BY 4.0 — free to use and adapt with attribution, and easy for company legal teams to accept.
Code
MIT — simple and universally understood.
Contributions
Developer Certificate of Origin — a one-line sign-off, as Linux uses. No agreements to sign, no legal cost.
Name and logo
Trademark held by the founder. The content stays open; the brand stays protected.
Anyone may use MOS commercially, including forking it — that is what open means, and the trademark only prevents a fork from passing itself off as official. MOS may later offer a paid hosted version built on contributed work. Both licenses permit this, and it is said plainly here so nobody is surprised later.