LDAP requiring Enterprise-license in Rocket.Chat 9.0

Feedback
1

The Rocket.Chat 8.8.0-rc.0 changelog contains a change that I think deserves more attention from the self-hosted community.

LDAP and SAML are being deprecated for workspaces without a Premium plan. They will continue to work in 8.8, but with Rocket.Chat 9.0.0 a Premium license containing the ldap-enterprise or saml-enterprise module will be required.

This is especially concerning because it continues a trend we have seen over the last few years: more and more functionality has moved away from the Community Edition or become restricted.

Examples include the monthly limit on push notifications, advanced LDAP functionality, read receipts, and now apparently LDAP authentication itself.

Of course, Rocket.Chat needs a sustainable business model, and charging for genuine enterprise functionality is perfectly reasonable. But there is a difference between adding new premium features and gradually removing established functionality from the Community Edition.

LDAP is particularly important because for many self-hosted organizations it is not an optional enterprise feature – it is part of their basic authentication infrastructure.

And simply staying on an older Rocket.Chat release is not really a sustainable alternative.

Rocket.Chat supports regular releases for only a limited period. Once a server version reaches End of Life, it no longer receives security or bug fixes, cloud-dependent services such as the Push Notification Gateway and Marketplace may stop working, and official Mobile/Desktop clients may eventually refuse to connect to the server.

In other words, administrators are effectively required to keep their installations reasonably current – while upgrading increasingly means losing functionality that was previously available to Community Edition users.

Is the Community Edition still intended to be a viable long-term self-hosted platform, or is it gradually becoming an entry point into the commercial editions?

2

Ldap etc has long been “Premium”. I fought hard to keep it in Starter… They were going to remove it from “free” versions altogether.

Note there is a LTS - again me and many others pushed for this. The first LTS was 7.10.x and the next will be 8.8.x - see the release life cycle in the docs.

CE - commecial realities I’m afraid. The code is there for you to use and modify as you wish. Add your own LDAP auth & notifications.

But what you really want is all the toys, pre-built, with no cost…

Ultimately devs gotta eat and Rocket can’t run and produce code without cash.

I am checking on what they are actually “removing”, or not, and will report back.

3

It always has been… Nothing new!

4

We are currently using a self-hosted Starter workspace with Active Directory (LDAP) and Microsoft Entra ID (SAML).

Does the 9.0 licensing change affect Starter as well, or only Community Edition workspaces?

The wording in the release notes is not entirely clear to me.