Rocket.Chat

Details

The project is provided under a license setup where MIT is used as a basis, with various parts of the codebase under a non-FOSS “Rocket.Chat Enterprise Edition (EE) license” which limits use & distribution.

The source for the mobile applications initially appears to be under an MIT license, with no other license mention in the readme or LICENSE file, until you dive deeper into a nested folder where the enterprise license exists there too, covering parts of the code.

Based on a simple search of the core application repo there does seem to be cases of the FOSS-code depending on the non-FOSS code. This appears the same for the mobile application codebase. A user queried the reliance on non-FOSS elements on GitHub, to which a project collaborator stated:

There’s a difference between Community Edition and the FOSS version; Community Edition is the basic rocket.chat as it exists on the repository, just without any enterprise license applied to it. It can use the code that is flagged as EE; The FOSS version on the other hand includes only the code under the MIT license. Currently there’s no “ready to build” version of it available yet. The fossify script just removes everything that isn’t FOSS,.

The project has guidance on the difference offerings in their documentation, with “Rocket.Chat Community” mentioned as the FOSS offering, but no specific download/use guidance is provided for this, and the difference in features is not provided in detail.

Their deploy documentation, found via their website, led to options for which the exact license/version was unclear. After running a shell for the advised official image (registry.rocket.chat/rocketchat/rocket.chat), a /app/bundle/programs/server/app/app.js bundle file could be found which appeared to contain the non-FOSS code elements. The deployment guidance from the project readme also leads to the same options & docker image.

The project advertises itself as “open-source” in many parts of its readme, with no mention of the other license in its readme, while also featuring an MIT license badge towards the top. Their website about page states the following:

Open-source by choice, transparent by nature
The future of communication is not on closed systems and will never be. We were born open-source and are proud to have over 30k stars on our GitHub repository.

The project appears to have raised at least $29m in funding from investors which include Alexia Ventures, Endeavor Catalyst, Endeavor Scaleup Ventures, Bob Young, NEA, Valor Capital Group, Greycroft, Monashees, DGF and Graphene. The project also appears to gain revenue from selling its software in various versions, by providing it as a service, and by providing support services.