How open-source is the chat-widget?

Rasa Open Source
1

Hi and thanks first of all for the great rasa open source sdk!

I’m considering to use the chat-widget, that is promoted in Your Own Website, as the production frontend on a website.

The chat-widget is available as a hosted, minified script to simply include and there is an npm package @rasahq/rasa-chat for it.

However, I struggle

  1. to find an open source repository, that I can clone, where I can see activity, commits and a changelog and
  2. to build it when installing, because it depends on @rasahq/rasa-api and @rasahq/rasa-ui and those two do not seem to be publicly available.

Consequently, I am not able to adjust this frontend or integrate it into an application.

Is this by intention? Or something only available to rasa-x users?

If the latter was the case, I’d be happy about recommendations of open-source, lightweight, adjustable chat frontends to be integrated to websites.

Thanks! Andreas

2

That widget is not open source. I don’t know that there were ever plans to make it open source. It can be used without Rasa X.

3

Hi @stephens!

I don’t want to argue in depth over the words “is open source”.

But note that rasa-chat itself is published under a Apache-2 license. I can download and browse the not-minified source code at npm. The license file of that package does not mention the internal libraries and only lists the remaining open-source dependencies.

The docs tell me that I could integrate the widget into a react app using the npm package, but that is not possible due to missing access to those internal libraries. The repository link goes to rasa-x.

When you say, “It can be used without Rasa X”, you presumably mean that I can use the minified script?

What I cannot do, however, is integrate it into an application, or update dependencies due to security issues, or make even small adjustment to it.

Wouldn’t you agree, that this is a realistic assumption of “use” from a developers point of view?

If you have a recommendation about alternatives to this chat-widget, I’d be happy to hear it. :slight_smile: