Bitwarden Switches to Commercial License

cross-posted from: thelemmy.club/post/57178796

cross-posted from: thelemmy.club/post/57178743

RyanL Bitwarden Employee

Hello everyone!

Starting in the next release, the Bitwarden apps published to the various stores will be the commercially licensed builds. No action is needed, and the apps will work exactly as they do today.

Bitwarden remains committed to open source security and transparency
The GPLv3 OSS licensed version continues to be updated and published on GitHub
All current features are available in both versions
License details are on GitHub
Bitwarden remains committed to a robust, free forever plan for everyone

If you have any questions, please ask them in this thread. Thanks all!

EDIT:

Bitwarden is not going closed-source
You can still fork Bitwarden
No change to self-hosting, the licensing change affects those who are repackaging and reselling Bitwarden
The free plan is here to stay permanently

community.bitwarden.com/t/published-version-update-in-app-stores/102750

Well, we all know how this ends…

It’s a really sad day for me, I love Bitwarden, it’s easily the best password manager I’ve used, and I’m in IT, I’ve used a bunch.

Fuck private equity, fuck it to death. But until then, I’ll be moving my test setup for KeyPassXC into production over the coming weeks and months.

I was happily subscribed to Bitwarden for years for my personal account, I moved several people and a whole company onto it’s platform. We had a good run, time to move on.

why not vaultwarden?

Vaultwarden (and all the client apps) depend on Bitwarden for the API spec. If Bitwarden introduces closed features in the API that Vaultwarden can’t/won’t implement, but the client apps do, it will split the spec. They can also introduce API license keys, which would render Vaultwarden mostly irrelevant.

The only way for Vaultwarden to remain relevant going forward is to own it and split ways from Bitwarden. This would in turn mean that the FOSS client apps have to decide which to support. But I think the ecosystem is going to fragment eventually anyway, so the sooner every app decides which way they want to go, the better.

Or you could just fork it when there’s a problem

Sounds like you’re volunteering to do that additional amount of work.

History shows this will happen. Or do you have any counter example?

Mariadb, libreoffice and most recently OpenCourant

Not arguing against it of course, just dislike when people make forking (and establishing a whole new standard) sound like not that big of a deal.

well, the first step of forking is clicking a button or execting a “git clone” command. thats trivial. publishing to android is a bit of work, but very one-time.

keeping up with development is a different story - but many foss projects thrive with support from whoever needs to have something fixed.