MEOK Goes Open Source: What FSL 1.1 Means for AI Sovereignty

What is MEOK releasing as open source?

Three components are being released today. The character SDK contains the personality engine, voice profiles, and archetype framework that powers every MEOK companion. The MCP server toolkit provides the Model Context Protocol integrations that allow companions to connect to calendars, task managers, and external data sources. The Byzantine Council consensus algorithm is Nicholas Templeman's Byzantine Fault Tolerant approach to multi-agent AI decision-making. All three are available on GitHub under FSL 1.1.

What is the Functional Source License 1.1?

FSL 1.1, used by Sentry and HashiCorp among others, occupies the space between fully proprietary and fully open. It prohibits competitors from selling the same functionality as their primary offering — protecting the commercial viability of the original creator — while permitting personal use and non-competing commercial use immediately. Critically, FSL 1.1 automatically converts to Apache 2.0 after two years. Everything we release today will be unconditionally open source by 2028.

We chose FSL over MIT or Apache 2.0 because we want the ecosystem to grow, but we also need to be able to sustain the people building it. Pure open source with no commercial protection has killed many projects that could have been important. FSL is the honest version of “we're open but we also need to survive.”

Why open source the Byzantine Council algorithm?

The Byzantine Council algorithm is the mechanism by which MEOK's council of AI agents reaches consensus on complex decisions — including decisions about your care score, task prioritisation, and companion evolution. It is a genuine contribution to the field of AI safety, not a marketing asset. We believe more implementations mean better research, more scrutiny, and faster improvements to the underlying approach.

Nicholas spent eighteen months developing and refining this algorithm. Keeping it proprietary would have protected a short-term competitive advantage. Open-sourcing it creates a long-term contribution to an area — multi-agent consensus with care constraints — that the field genuinely needs. That trade-off seemed obvious.

How can I contribute to MEOK?

GitHub contributions are welcome across four areas: new character archetypes (personality profiles for the companion engine), MCP server integrations (connecting companions to new data sources and tools), translations (the companion system currently supports English, with French, German, Spanish, and Japanese planned), and accessibility improvements (screen reader support, keyboard navigation, high-contrast modes). Bounties are available for top contributors — see the GitHub discussions board for active bounty listings. Join the Discord to coordinate with other contributors before starting larger pieces of work.

Will MEOK always be open source?

Core algorithms and SDKs remain open forever — Apache 2.0 by 2028 at the latest, and FSL 1.1 with immediate personal and non-competing commercial use from today. The hosted service, advanced features, and infrastructure will remain proprietary because they are how we fund the people writing the open-source code. This is the Sentry model: trust through transparency on the things that matter most, commercial sustainability on the things that require ongoing investment.

We are not open-sourcing MEOK as a marketing exercise. We are open-sourcing it because the question of how AI systems make decisions that affect people's lives is too important to keep inside a single company. Scrutiny makes it better. Collaboration makes it faster. And the Apache 2.0 conversion guarantee means you never have to take our word for it — you just have to wait two years.