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Bitwarden New CEO has extensive M&A, Private equity experience, Removes Transparency from its Motto (www.fastcompany.com)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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I find this move concerning, and wish that the Founder had looked for a new CEO that shared his values rather than a Private Equity and Mergers Expert.

Furthermore, the change to the GRIT motto is worrying. Trust is useless without Transparency when it comes to code and security.

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[–] 7 points 5 months ago (5 children)

Free and open source
Is free? Yep
Is OSS? Yep

Is it full libre? I think not, right? And I assume that is your actual issue with it?

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  • [–] 11 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    FOSS is a standardized term. As the Free Software Foundation defines it:

    Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a license that gives users the right to use, share, modify, and distribute the software – modified or not – to everyone and provides the means to exercise those rights using the software's source code.

    You are not granted right to modify or distribute Bitwarden. You can inspect and use that to build your own. That is what Vaultwarden does.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago

    Well, the client code is liensed GPL 3.0 and server code is licensed AGPL 3.0, and those are both FOSS licenses. There are some additional commercial components licensed under a non-FOSS source-available license, but those are not required for the basic service. I guess you can't use the Bitwarden trademark either. I would still consider Bitwarden FOSS, although with a slightly limited (but not crippling) scope of the term "Bitwarden".

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  • [–] -1 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    So you wanna say it's Source-Available, yes?

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  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    All I say is that it's not FOSS in the strict sense.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago

    Neither the OSI definition, nor the FSF definition require you to allow your trademark to be used freely, nor do they require you to only host FOSS software for your FOSS software to qualify as such. The client and server software published as GPL and APL qualify as FOSS by both orgs that define the term. Vaultwarden is better for self hosting specifically because it is superior software for self hosting.

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