You can have ONE air-gapped Starter workspace without having to contact sales.
Starter is free for up to 50 users. Any more and it will go read only.
You will HAVE to have a properly registered and paid for instance for airgapped with more than 50 users.
You MUST follow that precisely - the instance has to be completely airgapped during installation. It if detects ANY connectivity at all it will fail.
It will not apply to Community Edition - CE - no matter how many users.
A general note regarding ‘FOSS’ for anyone reading - don’t shoot the messenger as I don’t work for Rocket.
All the Rocket code is open source. You can read all the source, including the EE parts. That’s what open source means. The source is open to read.
However, the EE parts are strictly licenced for use. Different thing entirely.
The remainder of the code is MIT licenced - you can do with it as you wish.
But note. The BUILT versions of Rocket.Chat - be that CE, Starter, etc have licensing restrictions for use. Yup, they are built from the open source code, but that doesn’t make them open source themselves.
CE is a BUILT version of Rocket.Chat and has various limitations.
If you really want a ‘FOSS’ version then you need to get the source code, run the fossify script, remove any other bits you don’t like, and then build and deploy yourself.
You may not like this - many don’t, despite their business profiting from the use of Rocket - and rail against it. Rocket.Chat has to make some money somewhere to pay the devs to develop the code. They do not work for free (and neither do you).
And no, donations just do not work. Tried that. Failed. (I also help on a small linux server distro - we get by on donations JUST because we all work for free in our spare time - the donations just about cover the backend infra costs and that’s it - it would never cover a single devs wages)
Hope that clarifies it a bit - I need to do a proper post on this at some point.