The Founder and Project Coordinator
George Vasilache
George has had a passion for computers since the early 90s. He holds a BS in Computer Science and a Master in E-Business. He has spent over two decades in system engineering, IT project management and solution architecture design, in both public and private sectors, with over 200 IT projects delivered across many industries. His work covers the whole delivery lifecycle, from technical implementation to release management and policy deployment. He has a passion for photography, philosophy and contact sports, and one conviction about progress, that it counts only when it reaches everyone, and that complaining about it is not a plan. Building a human-centric future is.
Zethro grows out of his personal research on multi-agent systems, "The Orchestration Gap", on fine-tuning and distributed consensus mechanisms for agentic workflows, and the standards and policy they need. Zethro is a personal project and is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by any employer or institution.
Why it exists
Zethro began as the operating system for a small research lab working on multi-agent systems. The lab needed machines that could run autonomous software all day and still answer three questions at the end of it, what changed, who allowed it, and how to take it back. No distribution answered them, so we built one on Debian that does. The lab runs it, and the public release is the same system.
The Team
Zethro is built by a small team of enthusiasts with a passion for Linux, AI and technology, working from the written specification, one increment at a time, with tests before code, evidence after, and a security review by someone who did not write the change. Contributions are welcome under the Developer Certificate of Origin; see CONTRIBUTING in each repository.
The Code
We write Zethro in Zig. We picked it because it hides nothing. There is no implicit control flow, nothing allocates memory behind your back, and you handle every error or the build stops. The OS tools use no C library. Core uses four, all taken from Debian. Nothing we ship is written in Python or in shell.
We have one rule for the code. Every line has to point to the requirement that asked for it, or it does not get in. The lint checks this on every build. We write the test first, then the code that passes it. Every change comes with a record of what was done and why, and every security change is reviewed by someone who did not write it.
We build a release from a single commit, test it on real hardware, and one of us signs it. If you build the same commit, you get the same bytes. You do not have to take our word for any of this.