cross-posted from: https://thelemmy.club/post/57178743
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 everyoneIf 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



That’s quite the disappointment. Probably need to prepare to switch away from bitwarden or at least research options for open source clients for my vaultwarden backend.
Someone can correct me, but this change seems to be targeting people who are repackaging bitwarden and selling it. It does feel like we are trending the wrong direction though.
If you read their announcement carefully you’ll find things like
All current features are available in both versionsWhich strongly implies that the different versions will start to diverge over time. Then at one point they will just be like maah it’s not worth putting more work into the open source thing, we’ll focus on building new cool features yada yada yada. And this is how all the open to partly open to closed source rug pulls worked in the last years.
(If you want to do this the worst way possible like MinIO you also squash / delete the Git history the moment you announce you’re only working on closed source)
Minio also deleted the repos altogether about two weeks ago.
Yeah well, didn’t know this. I’m still running some old minio instances on my home server. Need to check if the docker images are still around otherwise I urgently need a backup plan…
Fucking hell, why didn’t they at least leave the old code available 😭
what is even out there? I pay for proton and bitwarden. but I just dont trust them
Before Bitwarden / Vaultwarden I went with Keepass (it was some fork don’t remember the exact name KeepassXC probably) synced via Nextcloud. It’s not as convenient as Bitwarden plus at least back then it didn’t support passkeys. So yeah, I don’t know what is actually out there. Honestly I don’t think it’s super urgent to start hunting for alternatives but probably we should have at least some ideas in case the Bitwarden team does some weird moves.