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Bitwarden Switches to Commercial License (community.bitwarden.com)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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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
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[–] 28 points 1 month ago (17 children)

why not vaultwarden?

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  • [–] 39 points 1 month ago

    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.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 month ago (6 children)

    I'm. Using Vaultgarden but its not clear if the Android app will still be available.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)

    I've been very happy with Vaultwarden+Keyguard

    https://keyguard.dev/

    Edit: I had not looked closely enough at the license and did not realize it's not FOSS, my bad

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago* (1 child)

    It currently doesn't work with Vaultwarden. The Linux client doesn't accept custom certificates. And the Android client is paid. It is a dead-end for self-hosting.

    The license is also stupidly a single sentence. Which means that use could be nuked at any minute, and any money you use to pay the developer means nothing. If they wanted to kill the project today and nuke the repo, you have no legal rights, the project dies and fuck you and your passwords. That doesn't exactly inspires confidence.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago*

    Thank you for pointing out that the license is not FOSS, I hadn't noticed that. I suppose I'll be exploring my options again.

    I'd been using the Android client from f-droid and hadn't needed to pay for it, which was working with my VW server. On my desktop/laptop I use rbw, so I hadn't noticed the cert issues with the kekeyguard desktop client.

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  • [–] 25 points 1 month ago (8 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago (7 children)

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

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  • [–] 20 points 1 month ago (6 children)

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

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  • [–] 7 points 1 month ago (4 children)

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

    Mariadb, libreoffice and most recently OpenCourant

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    You'll also have to convince other maintainers to adopt the new API in this case, otherwise it's pointless. Vaultwarden is only the server, you'd at least require one third-party client (e.g. Keyguard) to add and maintain the Vaultwarden API and probably also someone to fork the browser plugins. This whole issue is quite involved.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    When presented a hypothetical between the commenter suggesting it be

    A) forked now

    And me suggesting

    B) forking when there is a problem

    You elect C) the commenter does the work?

    Brilliant contribution

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