Open source tool chooses to become more open than ever

Bitwarden isn’t going proprietary after all. The company has changed its license terms once again – but this time, it has switched the license of its software development kit from its own homegrown one to version three of the GPL instead.

The move comes just weeks after we reported that it wasn’t strictly FOSS any more. At the time, the company claimed that this was just a mistake in how it packaged up its software, saying on Twitter:

It seems like a packaging bug was misunderstood as something more, and the team plans to resolve it. Bitwarden remains committed to the open source licensing model in place for years, along with retaining a fully featured free version for individual users.

Now it’s followed through on this. A GitHub commit entitled “Improve licensing language” changes the licensing on the company’s SDK from its own license to the unmodified GPL3.

Previously, if you removed the internal SDK, it was no longer possible to build the publicly available source code without errors. Now the publicly available SDK is GPL3 and you can get and build the whole thing.

  • Treedrake
    123•16 days ago

    Hopefully people can now stop jumping to conclusions and raging over nothing, but I doubt it.

    • @HessiaNerd
      30•16 days ago

      I was concerned. I have a family subscription coming due and no time to migrate. Really glad I don’t have to.

      • @Serinus
        5•16 days ago

        There’s always vaultwarden.

    • @[email protected]
      22•16 days ago

      Lemmy is so insanely anti company. I agree with being pro open source but the hissy fit people threw when one repo changed one thing was insane.

      • @[email protected]
        19•15 days ago

        While I think the cynicism is well-earned, we should pay attention to when we’re proven wrong and highlight when companies do something right. Bitwarden’s fuck-up gave them an opportunity to signal that they’re not intending to build a wall for their garden, and they took it.

        • @[email protected]
          6•15 days ago

          Ya, maybe it’s not what they intended, but we’ve see it happen enough where source is just closed. Good on them for rectifying it, either way.

  • quaffEnglish
    36•16 days ago

    Way to buck the trend. If I wasn’t already on a solid FOSS password manager, I’d be switching to Bitwarden for this alone.

  • @warmaster
    26•16 days ago

    Well, looks like I’m keeping my subscription.

  • Pumpkin EscobarEnglish
    18•16 days ago

    I’ve been tempted to ditch my current password manager and move to bitwarden. I think this is the final push I needed.

  • @Marthirial
    10•16 days ago

    Don’t even use the $10 premium features but will keep paying for it. Even if that was twice, I will pay it.