- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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
Having only ever used keepass, what was the advantage of bitwarden? That you didn’t need to sync it yourself?
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?
If I’m going to have to host my own infrastructure, I don’t want it tied to Bitwarden, given the new direction of the company.
I fully support Vaultwarden though, and I wish them well.
I’ll be going with KeyPassXC and Syncthing.
So, Vaultwarden it is?
This seems to be clients for the end devices, which I’m worried may actually be a move towards locking out VaultWarden which will uses the BW Clients
Not surprised in the slightest sadly.
Does anyone know if there’s any chance for a fork before this situation inevitably deteriorates? I dont know the license on that software enough to know if its an option.
are u gonna maintain clients?
No, I have money to pay instead. If I were able to contribute to the effort, I would have said that. Just picking fights in response to open questions today?
What’s the benefit for them to change the license?
Money
commercial providers can’t fork and sell it and give nothing back to the OSS community.
So basically they were getting undercut by people reselling the same a services under a different name.
And not having to do R&D
What differences will exist between the two parallel versions?
Some future components will be published under the commercial license and will exist only in that build. Newly developed features will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis for which license applies to them.
source: the page linked by OP, https://community.bitwarden.com/t/published-version-update-in-app-stores/102750/4
As always, people overreacting in the comments (of the linked forum). So the current plan is that the core remains OSS, but upcoming features are partially not. To me that sounds similar to Chrome’s or VSCode’s approach.
So the current plan is that the core remains OSS
… for now.
Embrace, Enhance, Extinguish.
*: got the E’s in the wrong order
Be cautious in such cases is not overreacting. We’ve seen enough open to closed rug pulls in the last years.
yeah sorry I dont want that
I’m not saying that’s great news, but it doesn’t sound like the self destruction move that some OSS companies have done recently. I wouldn’t migrate away just because of that change. In the end, they have to find a sustainable mode of operation.
They are going to slowly strip features from the free version over time.
So it’s open core now? As if this would be any better.







