Stewardship. Philterd, LLC is the steward of the PhiSQL specification and the PhiSQL trademark. The specification, its grammar, and the reference implementation live together in one Apache-2.0 repository, philterd/phisql, and each spec release is tagged there. The redaction policy JSON schema in that repository is the canonical contract, published at www.philterd.ai/schemas/redaction-policy/1.0.0/schema.json; PhiSQL is an authoring layer over it, so the schema leads and PhiSQL follows.
The RFC process. Substantive changes go through a public RFC (Request for Comments) process. Adding a PII entity type, a redaction strategy, a schema field or enum value, or a grammar construct starts as a proposal issue, is reviewed in the open on a pull request, and is accepted by merging the RFC and bumping the spec version. The full process, the review criteria, and the current merge authority are documented in CONTRIBUTING.md. Anyone can open an RFC proposal; accepted, rejected, and withdrawn RFCs are kept as a permanent record under rfcs/.
Versioning. The specification follows semantic versioning. Additive, backward-compatible features land in a minor version; a change that removes or renames a construct, tightens a previously permissive rule, or alters the compiled Phileas JSON for existing input requires a new major version. The redaction policy schema is versioned independently, so policies written against an older schema keep validating.
Conformance. The name PhiSQL is reserved for implementations that pass the conformance test suite, which is being developed in the open at philterd/phisql-conformance. An implementation claims conformance to a specific spec version by passing that version's suite.
Trademark. PhiSQL is a registered trademark of Philterd, LLC. The specification is freely readable and implementable under the Apache 2.0 license, but the PhiSQL name is reserved for conforming implementations.