Département des Harnais
the lab
The Lab audits. It maps sources — a publication, a codebase, a video, a scattered corpus — and returns a report in which every claim can be verified against its source. A report is not an opinion; it is an opposable dossier — dated, signed, and carrying its own record of how it was made. Two showcases: the decision sheets, public extracts of the dossiers in the catalogue; the specimens, dossiers published in open reading. The decision sheets are available in English; the dossiers themselves are written in French.
Cross-source: each regime, one requirement
Cross-source does not mean "a few links at the bottom of the page." It means holding together sources that are not verified the same way, to the same standard of a dated excerpt.
The requirement fits in one rule: no verdict without an excerpt. The harness supplies the material — it reads, cross-references, proposes; it does not decide. The verdict belongs to a deterministic test or to my own reading, not to a probability.
When the inquiry hits a wall — an inaccessible source, an unresolved contradiction, an uncovered area — the limit is written into the dossier, not smoothed over. A dossier without flaws, where the object had them, lies about how it was made. A marked zone of uncertainty is worth more than borrowed certainty.
Audit, don't plead
I do not deliver an opinion. An opinion is believed; a dossier is verified. The difference is not one of tone but of nature — and the Lab produces only the latter.
A forensic dossier, here, is an inquiry run on a precise, defensible object, before a third party who does not trust it a priori — a regulator, legal counsel, an engineering committee inheriting a stack it did not write. The object is mapped, its sources are named and dated, and each section's verdict rests on an excerpt one can go back and read. Nothing is asserted that is not shown; the making is shown.
What is rare here is not the format — the cross-source forensic report is open and can be described in one sentence — but the material: a precise subject, sources to map, and the access to the material that alone makes a verdict possible. A traditional audit does not attach the forensic proof of its own making; that proof is exactly what sets this dossier apart.
A report, and the trace that produced it
The workshop word is report when the analysis is composed of several successive sections — an object read from end to end, not a grid of checkboxes. It is set in Source Serif 4 and IBM Plex Mono, rendered as a book, and it arrives with the pieces that make it verifiable:
- a making trace as a .zip — the steps that produced the report, anonymized of third-party data, attached alongside like a critical apparatus to an edition;
- a cryptographic chain of custody: each piece sealed by an Ed25519 signature, which a single altered byte invalidates and reveals;
- a qualified timestamp, RFC 3161, issued by a third-party authority, dating the dossier with no possible back-dating.
decision sheets
public extracts · full dossier in the catalogueThe public extract of a decision dossier held in the catalogue: the question, the verdict, the sources cited. The full dossier is requested by email and delivered in French.
Microsoft 365: stay, leave in part, or leave?
What the sources teach an organisation of 50 to 500 seats, before 13 October 2026
Three lessons for an SME or a mid-cap: the calendar is not its own, the contract has opened and its texts are calibrated for this size, and no public case documents an exit at 50 or 500 seats. The decision therefore rests on seven checks to run in-house; the sheet says which ones, and before which dates.
read the sheetAfter VMware, for French-speaking SMEs and mid-caps
What the material teaches an SME or a mid-cap whose renewal falls within eighteen months
Three lessons: the price is no longer public, the quote is the first document to obtain; the ARM option does not exist for purchase, and waiting costs the price of the renewal every quarter; the decision rests on the farm's dependency profile and the contractual calendar, not on the brand. Stay under Broadcom or migrate to Proxmox VE / XCP-ng: the sheet rules by profile, on twenty-six named sources.
read the sheetArticle 14 of the CRA: am I concerned, and what must I have in place?
What Article 14 teaches a software publisher or manufacturer, and those who advise them, since 11 September 2026
For a publisher or manufacturer of ten to two hundred and fifty people, and for their counsel: 11 September 2026 is a regime, not a deadline; the scope is settled on three questions of text, not on size; what must be in place fits in eight points on the sheet, twelve lines in the dossier, with no tool and no price. The zones the text leaves open are named; the full dossier quotes the regulation passage by passage.
read the sheetOracle to PostgreSQL: migrate or stay?
What the Oracle texts teach a public body or a mid-cap before its support anniversary
Three lessons for an organisation that holds licensed Oracle databases: the contract decides, before the technology; Oracle's public dates can be revised, and the only one that commands is in the signed order; dated cases are rare and old. The decision therefore rests on nine questions and an inventory; the sheet says which, the full dossier quotes the clauses.
read the sheetA decision dossier from the catalogue or on mandate, a published piece, a countersignature — the door of the Lab: Travailler avec moi (page in French).
specimens
open reading · trace includedFive dossiers published in open and complete reading, making trace included: they show the method on the piece, r0 being the Lab audited against its own doctrine.
BSL/SSPL/AGPL licences: the real legal risk for a Belgian company in 2026
Redis, MongoDB and CockroachDB changed licence: court decisions, guides from Belgian lawyers and an audit of compliance tools.
This dossier is a technical and legal analysis, not legal advice. Readings that go beyond the literal text of the licences are labelled as such; the final qualification belongs to counsel admitted to the Belgian bar.
read the dossier (in French)Outline: the architecture under the hood of an open-source knowledge base
Outline presents itself as "the open-source alternative to Notion", but its stack of Node.js, PostgreSQL, Redis, S3 and OIDC requires eight mandatory dependencies and regular maintenance.
The BSL 1.1 licence allows internal use for twenty employees, forbids SaaS resale, and only switches to Apache 2.0 in 2030. Self-hosting is realistic if your team has a half-time DevOps profile and an OIDC identity provider in place; otherwise, the human costs exceed the Cloud subscription. For a team of twenty, the choice comes down to a simple equation: modest savings against certain operational debt.
read the dossier (in French)Langfuse, LangSmith, Phoenix: the real spectrum of LLM observability
"Open-source": the word that covers three regimes
The report reads the licences rather than the sales pitch — and the spectrum that comes out is not the one we're sold.
read the dossier (in French)Supabase: the hidden TCO of the open-source Firebase
Supabase is Apache-licensed and promises a full backend in a few clicks.
I calculated what self-hosting really costs at scale for an SME.
read the dossier (in French)The piece before the act
The Département des Harnais audited against its own doctrine.
A dossier confronting the manual "Project Room" prescribed by Nate B. Jones with the Département des Harnais' automated chain. The Lab's first report explains its work — not just what it concludes, but how it gets there.
read the dossier (in French)The license is split. The report, as an intellectual object, stays under my copyright; the forensic trace that produced it is open under CC-BY 4.0. The reader can pull a file from the .zip, re-read it, republish it — they cannot pass my report off as their own. The proof is open; the text is signed.