Sustaining Our Mission: Why ECHO is Moving from AGPLv3 to BSL1.1

March 26th, 2025, by Jorim

When we announced ECHO was going open source two months ago, we were driven by a powerful belief: the tools shaping our democratic future should be transparent, accountable, and community-driven. Today, we're taking another step to ensure that vision remains sustainable for years to come.

After careful consideration, we're transitioning ECHO from the AGPLv3 license to the Business Source License (BSL 1.1). This decision wasn't made lightly, but we believe it strikes the perfect balance between maintaining our open source values and ensuring Dembrane can continue building democratic technology for the long term.

Why We're Making This Change

Since releasing ECHO as open source in February, we've witnessed amazing community engagement, for example Athabasca University expressing interest to develop end to end encryption for audio in transit for sensitive use cases. However, we've also encountered challenges we didn't anticipate. While AGPLv3 provided the openness we value, it didn't protect our ability to sustain continuous development.

"We fundamentally believe in openness, but we also need to ensure Dembrane can continue putting significant effort into building the best democratic technology tools possible." - Jorim, Founder

This shift to BSL allows us to protect our core mission while still delivering on our commitment to transparency and community collaboration. By ensuring the economic sustainability of ECHO, we can dedicate more resources to improving the platform rather than creating separate commercial features or proprietary extensions.

What Does BSL Mean For You?

For the vast majority of our community, nothing changes:

• All Dembrane source code remains fully open and available on GitHub

• Non-commercial use (including research, education, and small organisations) remains completely free

• Commercial use below a revenue threshold continues to be permitted

• The code automatically converts back to GPLv3 after a defined period (3 years)

• All previously released GPLv3 versions remain available under that license

The primary change affects large commercial entities that use ECHO to provide competing services. These organisations will now need a commercial license, which helps support the ongoing development of the platform we're all building together.

This approach has been successfully used by notable open source projects like MariaDB, Sentry, CockroachDB, and Directus, who faced similar sustainability challenges and whose blog’s and licence structures we are heavily inspired by.

“We understand that the BSL license does not meet all of the Open Source Initiative’s 10 criteria for a license to be open source, but we and our community understand the fundamental needs of sustainable open source, something which is only solved by balance.” -

Our Ongoing Commitment to Openness

This license change reflects an evolution in our approach, not a departure from our values. We remain deeply committed to:

1. Transparency: All code remains public and viewable

2. Community collaboration: We welcome contributions from developers worldwide

3. Accessibility: Organisations with limited resources can still use ECHO freely

4. Long-term openness: All code eventually reverts to GPLv3

By taking this step, we're ensuring that Dembrane can continue to invest in building state-of-the-art democratic technology that helps communities grow in wisdom, impact, and connectedness as they scale.

Major Release: ECHO 1.0.0

This license change coincides with a significant milestone in ECHO's journey. We're excited to announce that ECHO is graduating from version 0.0.9 (pilot) to version 1.0.0 (production ready). This marks a major achievement for our team and community, signalling that ECHO is now stable and robust enough for production environments.

As part of this 1.0.0 release, we're introducing several important additions:

1. Deployment Code Release: We're making our GitOps code (Infrastructure and Configuration as Code) available, enabling seamless deployment of ECHO in various environments. This will significantly reduce the technical barriers to adoption and allow organisations to integrate ECHO into their existing infrastructure with minimal friction. Link to Repository

2. Enhanced Audio Processing Pipeline: Major updates to our audio processing pipeline will deliver improved quality, reliability, and performance for all voice-based democratic processes.

We are also launching two exciting new features designed to enhance collective decision-making (details to be announced in upcoming releases).

All these additions will be available under the BSL license for the reasons outlined above, ensuring we can continue to innovate while maintaining our commitment to openness.

What's Next for ECHO

This license change coincides with exciting developments in ECHO's roadmap. We're doubling down on our core features while exploring new ways to make collective decision-making more accessible and effective for organisations of all sizes.

We believe this balanced approach will strengthen ECHO's position as a leading platform for democratic engagement while ensuring we can sustain our mission for the long term.

As always, we're eager to hear your thoughts and answer any questions you might have about this transition. Our team is available to discuss how this change might affect your specific use case.

The Dembrane Team

Built with Care in Europe

Published March 26th, 2025

🚧 Want to contribute to the code? Visit ECHO's GitHub.

📨 Have questions about licensing? Contact bram@dembrane.com.

💡 Inspired to join us? Check out our open roles here.