Six days ago I wrote that the plan has always been to patent everything and then give it away. Today the second half of that sentence stops being a plan.
Two repositories went public this morning:
- maniTC — the ManiT programming language and its compiler: ~46,000 lines of Rust, two backends (LLVM for the machine on your desk, T3ISA for balanced ternary hardware), a cycle-accurate ternary emulator with an interactive debugger, a 12-module standard library, 17 example programs, a language server, and the full documentation set.
- thatteOS — a microkernel operating system written entirely in ManiT: scheduler, processes, three-ring security, trit-addressed virtual memory, a ternary file system, three IPC mechanisms, capability-based security, an interactive shell, and thirteen userspace programs including a text editor, a file manager, and a web browser — all of it thinking in threes.
Clone them. Build them. Run a program tonight whose every integer, every address, and every branch is balanced ternary. The Getting Started handbook takes you from nothing to a running ternary operating system in under an hour.
Why This Is Not Just Another Repo
Every programming language you have ever used assumes two. Two voltage levels, two truth values, two directions for a branch to go. That assumption is seventy-nine years old, and it was made for reasons of 1940s engineering convenience — not because two is the right number.
Balanced ternary — digits of −1, 0, +1 — is the number system where negation is free, where signed arithmetic needs no two's-complement contortions, and where a comparison has three natural outcomes that map to a single three-way branch. Donald Knuth called it “the prettiest number system of all.” The Soviet Setun computers proved it worked in hardware in 1958 and then history moved on without it.
What has never existed — not in 1958, not since — is a complete, modern software stack built on it from first principles: a typed systems language where three-valued logic is native rather than emulated, a compiler that optimises in ternary, an instruction set designed for it, and an operating system whose privilege model is literally one trit deep. That is what went public today. As far as I know, you are looking at the first such stack on Earth.
What You Can Do With It Today
You do not need exotic hardware. The stack runs two ways right now:
Natively. The compiler's LLVM backend turns ManiT into ordinary binaries. The THATTEOS shell and its userspace run on Linux today — the same kernel source, hosted.
On the emulator. The T3ISA backend targets a balanced ternary instruction set, and the bundled cycle-accurate emulator executes it — complete with a debugger that lets you step through trit-level execution and watch a three-way branch resolve.
The hardware those instructions were designed for — the photonic-ternary device fabric covered by the twelve patent specifications filed with the Indian Patent Office — is the other half of this project, and it advances on its own track: simulation-confirmed physics, international filings underway, laboratory validation next. The software is not waiting for the hardware, and now, neither are you.
The License, Plainly
Both repositories are AGPL-3.0, with two deliberate carve-outs that matter to you:
- Programs you write in ManiT are yours. The Runtime Library Exception means compiling with manitc and linking the runtime and stdlib places no license on your output. Closed, open, commercial — your choice, exactly as with GCC.
- Programs that run on THATTEOS are yours. The syscall boundary note means using the kernel's services is normal use, not derivation — the same principle Linux has always applied.
The copyleft protects the commons itself: if you modify the compiler or the kernel — including running modified versions as a network service — you share those modifications back. Organisations that need proprietary derivatives of the stack itself can take a commercial license. That asymmetry is the point: the community's stack stays free; those who would enclose it fund the work instead.
Why Give It Away?
Because the patents were never about rent. They establish authorship — twelve complete specifications, one inventor, from device physics to this operating system — and they prevent anyone else from fencing off what is released here. Protection first, so that liberation cannot be undone. That is the whole architecture of the plan, and today its second movement begins.
A paradigm does not shift because one person files documents. It shifts when a
student in Pune or Lagos or São Paulo writes her first
tif statement and feels the third branch click into place. When
someone ports the compiler to a platform I never considered. When the first
program I could never have imagined runs on trits. The repositories are open,
the discussions
are on, and contribution is a one-line agreement away.
Be among the first people on Earth to compute in threes.