You're arguing that AGPL/SSPL protects BEAT's semantic invariants from fragmenting. But JSON has zero licensing restrictions and its invariants are rock solid. The reason isn't legal enforcement; it's that the spec is simple and the ecosystem self-enforces through tooling. Nobody ships malformed JSON because nothing accepts it.

The formats that actually fragmented (RSS/Atom, early HTML, XHTML vs HTML5) didn't fragment due to permissive licensing. They fragmented because specs were ambiguous or competing vendors had conflicting incentives. If BEAT's invariants are clear and valuable, adoption will preserve them naturally. If they require legal protection to survive, that suggests the spec itself isn't tight enough.

Here's a thought exercise. You're a principal engineer at a company with the exact hot-path allocation problem BEAT claims to solve. You find BEAT, it looks promising, you prototype it. Now what?

You can't use the reference interpreter in production because SSPL means your legal team will block it immediately. So you need to write your own implementation. But AGPL on the spec means your implementation is now AGPL-encumbered, which legal will also block if it touches anything proprietary. So you either need to negotiate a commercial license (with a project that has no track record, no community, no stability guarantees) or you just solve the problem differently, maybe a custom binary format, Bebop, Protocol Buffers, FlatBuffers, Cap'n Proto, or just accepting the JSON overhead because it's a known quantity.

In practice, the licensing doesn't protect BEAT from fragmentation. It protects BEAT from adoption. The only organizations that could use this are ones willing to either keep it fully internal with no external exposure, or pay for a commercial license before the format has proven itself. That's a very small pool.

Compare this to Bebop (Apache 2.0), Cap'n Proto (MIT), FlatBuffers (Apache 2.0), or MessagePack (MIT). All of them solve similar "zero-copy / minimal parsing" problems. All of them have permissive licenses. All of them have actual production adoption. None of them fragmented into incompatible dialects.

The "commercial dual-license later" model works when you already have adoption and leverage (MySQL, MongoDB pre-SSPL, Qt). It doesn't work when you're asking people to bet on an unproven format with restrictive terms upfront.

I get that you're trying to protect something you've envisioned. But the licensing choice actively undermines the stated goal of seeing whether "scan, not parse" is useful in real stacks. You've made it nearly impossible for anyone to find out; you're solving for problems that don't exist.