Licences and attribution
What Cordice is made of, who else made it, and what belongs to us.
The software
Cordice is free software, licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3.0 or later (opens in a new tab).
That licence gives you the right to use it, study it, change it and pass it on. It also obliges us to something most services do not offer: because Cordice is run over a network, anyone using it is entitled to the complete corresponding source of the version that is actually running.
Source: github.com/wearecordice/Cordice (opens in a new tab)
That is the whole thing — the server, the clients, this website, and the compose files we deploy from. Not a mirror, not a subset published for show.
Built on Stoat
Cordice is a modified fork of Stoat (opens in a new tab), formerly Revolt. Copyright in the original work is held by the Stoat and Revolt authors and contributors, and their notices are kept throughout our repository as the licence requires.
Modifications — the rebrand, the configuration, the changes to how it is deployed and to the clients — began in 2026 and are ours.
Cordice is not run by, endorsed by, or associated with the Stoat project. If something here is broken, it is our fault and not theirs.
Typefaces and images we redistribute
These are not covered by the AGPL. Each is redistributed under its own terms, and the licence text is served from the same place as the files it covers.
| What | Licence | Copyright |
|---|---|---|
| Inter (opens in a new tab) | SIL Open Font License 1.1 | © 2016 The Inter Project Authors |
| Twemoji (opens in a new tab) | CC BY 4.0 | © Twitter, Inc and other contributors |
| Noto Emoji (opens in a new tab) | SIL Open Font License 1.1 | © 2013 Google LLC |
| Material Design Icons (opens in a new tab) | Apache 2.0 | © Google LLC |
The emoji are served from our own domain rather than someone else’s, so that using Cordice does not tell a third party which messages you are reading.
The client also ships a set of typefaces you can choose between in its appearance settings. Every one of them is under an open font licence, and each licence is reproduced in the notices file below.
What we run on your behalf
These are not sent to your browser — they run on our servers — so their licences do not oblige us to hand you their text. They are listed because a service that will not say what it is built from is asking to be taken on trust, and because our own licence means you could stand the whole thing up yourself and would want to know what you were getting into.
| What | Licence |
|---|---|
| MongoDB | SSPL 1.0 |
| KeyDB | BSD 3-Clause |
| RabbitMQ | MPL 2.0 |
| MinIO | AGPL-3.0 |
| LiveKit | Apache 2.0 |
| Stalwart | AGPL-3.0 |
| Caddy | Apache 2.0 |
The Cordice server itself is written in Rust and draws on around eight hundred and sixty crates, almost all of them under MIT or Apache 2.0. We do not distribute the compiled server to anybody, so what discharges that is the source: it is published in full, and every dependency is declared in it.
Everything else
Cordice depends on a great deal of open-source software — over a thousand packages across the client and this site. Their licences almost all say the same thing: use it freely, and keep the copyright notice with the copy.
Your browser receives such a copy every time it loads Cordice, so those notices are published here rather than left in a repository:
Third-party notices — every package we ship, its licence, and the text of that licence.
That file is generated from what the package manager actually resolved, so it describes the build that shipped rather than a list somebody remembered to update.
The Android app
The Android app carries its own list, generated at build time from what went into that build. It is in the app itself, under About → Open Source Licenses, which is where somebody holding the app can actually reach it.
What belongs to us
The visual identity of Cordice is original work, made by us, and it is not covered by the software licence.
That means, specifically:
- the name Cordice;
- the isometric cube mark, in every form and every size it is drawn at, and the icon files generated from it;
- the wordmark — the mark set beside the word — and the lockup they form;
- the colour palette, including the brand violet the whole scheme is derived from;
- the typographic treatment, layout and visual design of this site and of the clients;
- our illustrations, our diagrams, our product screenshots and our photography;
- the text on this site, in the help centre, and in these documents.
None of it was commissioned, bought in, generated from somebody else’s work, or inherited from the project we forked. It was drawn and written for Cordice, and copyright in it is ours. © Cordice, 2026. All rights reserved.
The software licence does not give any of it away, and that is not a loophole — it is how the licence is built. AGPL-3.0 grants rights in source code. It says nothing about a name, a mark or a design, and no version of it has ever included the right to present a copy as the original.
So the code and the identity part company here: take the software, leave the face. In practice:
- You may run Cordice yourself, modify it, and say truthfully that your service runs on Cordice.
- You may refer to us by name — in an article, a comparison, a link.
- You may not use our name or mark as the name or mark of your own service, product or community, or in a way that suggests we run it, endorse it, or are answerable for it.
- You may not pass our writing, our page designs or our images off as your own.
If you want to use the mark for something and are not sure which side of that line it falls on, ask at [email protected] — the answer is usually yes.
If we have got this wrong
If your work is used here without proper credit, or credited incorrectly, tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it. That is a correction we want to make, not one we need to be persuaded into.