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
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
No, that would GPL. The benefit for them is that some features will be paid and won’t be unlockable just by using Vaultwarden
it literally says in the post that the license change affects companies who are repackaging and reselling bitwarden, but ok.
But this is the post by bitwarden, defending their decision. AKA marketing.
Can you explain how bitwarden can be “repackaged and resold”, that would be stopped by that change?
Everybody can still fork/rename/publish the FOSS version which is continued to be available. Everybody can connect to vaultwarden…?
Yeah this only makes sense if the builds start diverging from the open source code, extra features that are closed source.
Yeah, but there’s no guarantee the FOSS version will be the same as the closed one.
There is certainty that the Foss version won’t be worse than current bitwarden client. Then those will diverge. So?
The current FOSS backend used to be the center of the ecosystem. Going forward that may change. If it stops being that center and it becomes merely a token offering so Bitwarden can claim “we’re still doing FOSS” then it will become pointless.
Simply forking the backend is meaningless without the work to also drag along the entire ecosystem, or establish a new one. Forking a project takes time, effort, vision, persistence, determination.
The back end is already solved by vaultwarden, so I’m not sure what you mean
source: the page linked by OP, https://community.bitwarden.com/t/published-version-update-in-app-stores/102750/4