OPERATOR is a
fact only the operator can supply: any additional licensing note
that applies to this deployment, such as a modification that
changes the terms, or a bundled component the operator added. Fill
it in, and have a qualified lawyer read the result, before
presenting this document as binding.
The contact points in these documents are the project's own. If you run your own
instance, replace them with yours before you publish them.
Version: 1.0 ·
Template last revised: 2026-09-20 ·
Effective on this instance:
OPERATOR: the date this document takes effect on this instance
1. The software
Trycord is released under the MIT licence. The full text is in the
LICENSE file at the root of the repository, and it is
the licence that applies to the server, the web client, the
desktop client and the public website.
In short: you may use the software, including commercially; you may copy it, modify it, merge it into your own work, publish it, and distribute it; and you may sublicense it. The one condition is that the copyright notice and the permission notice travel with every copy or substantial portion of it.
The licence comes with no warranty. The software is provided as it is, and the responsibility for running it, and for what it does with other people's data, stays with whoever runs it.
2. The dependencies
The server is built on established libraries rather than on home-made versions of the parts that are hard to get right: password hashing, token signing, TLS-terminating proxies, database drivers, mail transport and the HTTP stack itself. Each dependency carries its own licence.
These are the direct dependencies of the server, with the licence each one carries. Every one of them is compatible with the MIT licence this project uses, and there is no copyleft anywhere in the tree.
| Package | Licence |
|---|---|
| express | MIT |
| ws | MIT |
| bcrypt | MIT |
| jsonwebtoken | MIT |
| cors | MIT |
| multer | MIT |
| mysql2 | MIT |
| better-sqlite3 | MIT |
| nodemailer | MIT-0 |
| dotenv | BSD-2-Clause |
The client carries one vendored library: @noble/curves
(MIT), which supplies the elliptic-curve arithmetic its
end-to-end encryption needs. It is vendored into the client
rather than fetched from a content delivery network, because the
client is served by the instance and must not depend on somebody
else's host for the arithmetic its privacy rests on. Its licence
text is in frontend/packages/vendor/LICENSE.noble-curves.
The SDK, trycord-botjs, is part of this project and
carries the same MIT licence. It has no runtime dependencies at
all: it speaks HTTP to the instance and nothing else, so a bot
that installs it pulls in nobody else's code.
None of the core functionality requires a third-party account or a hosted service. Optional integrations, such as mail delivery, an object store for uploads, or a turn server for voice, are clearly marked and can be left unconfigured.
3. Fonts and artwork
The website and the clients use Manrope for text and JetBrains Mono
for code. Both are distributed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1,
which permits use in a website or an application, including
commercially. The licence text for both families is included with
them in frontend/assets/trycord-assets/fonts/OFL.txt, and the copyright
notices for both are in frontend/assets/trycord-assets/fonts/NOTICE.txt — the
licence requires the notice of the copyright holder to travel with
the font, and there are two families here.
The flame mark and the other artwork in this repository are part
of the project and are covered by the MIT licence, with the
exception of anything that came from somewhere else. The icon and
the social preview image are in public/assets.
If you redistribute the site, keep the licence texts and the notices with it. That is what the fonts' licence asks for, and it is the polite thing to do with every dependency.
4. What the licence does not cover
The MIT licence covers the software. It does not cover the content people post on an instance, the names and logos of the communities on it, or the terms in the Terms of Service. Those are between the people who post them and the operator of the instance they are posted on.
It also does not make the project responsible for an instance. A self-hoster running this software is running their own service, under their own name, with their own obligations; the licence gives them permission to do that, and nothing more.
5. Your own instance
You may run an unmodified instance, a modified one, or one with your own code alongside it. If you modify the software and publish it, the published version is yours to license, provided the notices of the original work travel with it. If you keep the original name and mark, that implies the project endorses your version, which it does not; a fork with a different name is a different thing and does not need a permission to exist.
6. Trademarks
The MIT licence grants rights in the code. It does not grant rights in the name Trycord or in the flame mark, and it does not let anybody use them in a way that suggests a connection with the project that does not exist.
7. Contributions
A contribution you send to the project is accepted under the same MIT licence as the rest of the software. Say so when you send it, and do not send code you are not allowed to license this way. A change that is accepted is credited the way the project credits contributions generally, which is in the commit history.
An operator's own note about the licence of this deployment is OPERATOR: any additional licensing note for this deployment.