I've only tried Ratchet in a sandbox and not in any production project. And as far as that, it worked well. I've done some minor stuff involving ReactPHP (which Ratchet uses for some parts) in the early days of the project, but same here - nothing that was deployed to production.
I'm no expert either, but I just leave a note regarding Pushpin (http://pushpin.org/) here as an option to have a websocket server together with PHP. It's not a PHP project, but a good tool to have in the toolbox :)
I think it's about the same thing in Sweden (the student has the rights).
At the sime time, there are two different rights; copyright and "usage right" (not sure if that last thing is translated correctly), which means that you own the stuff you've created, but you can transfer the right of using it to someone else.
I'm no expert either, but I just leave a note regarding Pushpin (http://pushpin.org/) here as an option to have a websocket server together with PHP. It's not a PHP project, but a good tool to have in the toolbox :)