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Bitwarden switches password manager and SDK to GPL3 (www.theregister.com)

submitted 1 week ago by ForgottenFlux to c/technology

29 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] [email protected] 300 points 1 week ago (10 children)

Wow, a commercial open source product that COULD have pulled a rugpull, looked for all the world like they were planning a rugpull, just uh, did the right thing?

Good job, Bitwarden.

[–] [email protected] 52 points 1 week ago (6 children)

I'm sure all the folks who were quick to ignore or dismiss their clarification of the packaging issue at the time will be just as quick to make comments like these as they were to skewer them then.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (5 children)

I tried convincing people to give them the benefit of the doubt and see what they do, but no, everyone seemed to jump to conclusions.

Glad my trust wasn't misplaced this time. I have been and continue to be a paying customer.

[–] baatliwala 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

everyone seemed to jump to conclusions.

Honestly, everyone's been so burned by companies pulling the wool over their eyes that there's just no trust left. People were happy with Mozilla 5-6 years ago and nowadays everyone is a skeptic.

You might be right in this case but they weren't wrong.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I get it, some orgs/projects do bad things, and we should absolutely roast them for it. But I believe in giving the benefit of the doubt for a period before melting down.

For example:

Mozilla - looking into ads (and have been for a few years) as an alternative revenue source to Google search; I hate ads, but the browser is still better for me than others, so I'll wait to see what they are planning
Docker - moved to a commercial tier, but their community tier is still quite viable, so I still use it; I'm experimenting w/ alternatives, but I don't need to jump ship just yet (was getting ready a few years ago when they announced the separate "community" builds)
Opera - was never FOSS, but they were a good browser when they had their own engine; that changed, so I jumped ship and went back to Firefox (had left Firefox because I wanted more than just IE/Chrome/Firefox/Safari)
Ubuntu - I used them for a while, but they kept making changes I and the community didn't like, so I bailed; this was long before the current snap nonsense, and I've stayed away ever since (switched to Fedora then Arch and now openSUSE)

When a software project you use changes for the worse, look for alternatives, but give that product time to fix it. If they continue on the negative path, then definitely bail. If everyone bails at the first hint of trouble, we end up with a ton of half-baked projects instead of a few good ones. Give feedback and support good projects.

[–] baatliwala 2 points 1 week ago

Yep, you're right there.

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