- cross-posted to:
- linux@lemmy.world
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- linux@lemmy.world
- technology@lemmy.world
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
You must log in or register to comment.
@Mustachius_Grumpius “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”
yeah but its typical double speak
Why do you think so?
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all “current” features. further down its asked about the future and they arent always clear but the fo state there wont be feature parity moving forward
Yup. All CURRENT, these will start to diverge…
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I swear most of Grafana’s new features are enterprise only now
- Embrace
- Extend
- Extinguish
If there is no intention to put the screws to the user base, then why do it on the first place?
We all know how this game ends when venture capital gets involved.
I kinda thought the paid plan already had extra features no? Like silly ones but I swear it isn’t just donations right?
It had cloud storage, built in TOTP with autofill, and some had features like organizations and sharing
Still, this fucking sucks. Bitwarden was literally created as a ln answer to this shit happening to LastPass and Dashlane.
Not surprised in the slightest sadly.
I guess we’re gonna see more open-source apps soon, aimed at Vaultwarden first
Does anyone have a handy guide to switching to selfhosted version? I was considering doing that but I let my plan renew out of laziness.
Idk how it compares feature wise, but i have been running keepassxc/keepassdx combined with syncthing (or any file synchronization/cloud system) for many years without issues. The entire password manager database sits in one encrypted .kdbx file that you keep synced between your devices. Syncthing is nice because its p2p, so no self-/hosting required.
https://keepassxc.org/
https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxchttps://f-droid.org/packages/com.kunzisoft.keepass.libre/
https://syncthing.net/
https://github.com/syncthing/syncthingI used keepass but switched to vaultwarden, i might consider switching back, but is there a good self hostable web front end for a keepass database? (I need to access it on my work laptop and can’t install stuff there)
I dont think there is. Keepass is trying to be as offline as possible. Just makes for a piece of software with much less attack surface.
There is KeeWeb but I am not sure how well maintained it is. This issue is still open. It might be worth contacting your employers IT department instead. Asking for a well known password manager like KeePass shouldn’t raise any eyebrows.
Yup great combo. It baffles me why anyone one would favour to depend oneself on an online service instead
I just wish Syncthing didn’t have such a convoluted port usage, and also that its Android usage didn’t revolve around an unofficial app.
So I’ll stick to apps that do sync over SSH (using FolderSync atm).
Every single time Bitwarden is mentioned on the internet, someone comes in here and proudly recites the anthem “I have been using Keep ass with sink things”
It sucks compared to a dedicated extension.
No autofill No TOTP or 2FA support Doesn’t do passkeys Doesn’t have organizational sharing Doesn’t sync to mobile devices Doesn’t integrate with mobile browsers without trusting some compatible 3rd party app Requires selfhosting your passwords (don’t fuck it up!)
It’s actually pretty sad that the open source world doesn’t have a better solution for this. I mean I guess BitWarden was it but that’s been stolen by venture capital so
Why is it that every time i comment about keepass, its because some web based password manager once again broke, got hacked, or stopped development. Keepass users just stay winning :)
Also i have been using keepass with TOTP 2FA for years what are you on about?
Also also, you shouldnt use fido passkeys. Its a failed technology that is worse than what it tries to replace.
There isn’t anything wrong with passkeys that can’t also be made wrong with passwords, and there isn’t anything more secure about passwords, at all.
Please don’t tell me you took that article that was spammed all over here a few days ago at face value…
I’ve been using that for a while. I like the control I have in that I understand where everything is stored and encrypted. I miss the way that Google password manager had the autofill for seemingly every page nailed though.
That’s my stack, except swap keepassdx for keepass2android, and add the Firefox plugin.
I had done that for a long time. It worked until it didn’t and I lost passwords. I tried again with keepass2android and it’s built-in sync. It again worked fine until at some point it wasn’t able to sync anymore for no discernible reason. I’d love for this to be a reliable setup, but it just isn’t in my experience, at least when there are 3+ devices involved with different clients and no proper awareness of the password manager and the sync sides of each other.
Exactly. No way I’m going to use this for something critical.
Here it explains some self host options with links to “Get Started” for each:
https://bitwarden.com/help/self-host-bitwarden/
For example, here’s the link to “Linux standard deployment”
https://bitwarden.com/help/install-on-premise-linux/
You may also want to consider not making your server available to the open internet, and instead access it only on your LAN via VPN.
That or jump to Vaultwarden https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden
Is there another client we can use with vaultwarden though? (In the scenario wgere that gets locked down)
There is an iOS app for Vaultwarden. Under that name.
https://apps.apple.com/za/app/vaultwarden-password-manager/id6799711599
Don’t see one for Android. And for the rest I just online.
The web interface is hosted directly by your vaultwarden interface so it’s not lockdown-able. The only things that are would be the browser extension and phone apps. Both of which are formally unnecessary because you can always just use the web interface. I’m sure if they ever locked down there’d be community versions in no time as they’re basically just web wrappers anyway.
The apps keep a synced local copy, so if the server is down or unreachable you can still get to your passwords. That can also be locked by biometrics etc.
There’s a lot of stuff that without be lost by going to just the web interface
great suggestion
Vaultwarden still depends on upstream bitwarden
What’s the benefit for them to change the license?
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…?
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are u gonna maintain clients?
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Claude, code me a bit warden clone…
Careful, Claude is very sensitive these days. Might want to add ‘please’ and ‘thankyou’.
Anthropic is drawing a line in the sand protecting their model’s training sets from abuse.
Meanwhile OpenAI is down in a dungeon torturing GPT6 into writing academic mathematics papers.
Sure, it’s no change for self hosters currently, but it’s one more step in moving towards a more closed platform overall. I do hope more FOSS client apps end up getting made sometime soon. I’ve been using Keyguard on Android for some time, which means the recent several breaking changes in the Bitwarden apps to the Vaultwarden backend haven’t hit me as hard, but I do still use the official apps for my laptop and desktop and Keyguard isnt fully FOSS, of course. I’d love to see some forks or brand new apps one of these days that are actually fully FOSS for both mobile and browsers. I’ve thought about doing some myself, but I have too many other projects and I also don’t have a MAC or want to pay the fees to make an iPhone version. And I abandoned my Android Developer account when they started the identity nonsense, so none of my apps are on the official store anymore and Fdroid and similar may not be viable soon, so it would only really be for myself and a few others who use alternate Android OS’s.
Side note: I just tried switching to KeePassXC and it seems pretty fine, except for one caveat. If you installed your browser (probs FF or Librewolf) through flatpak or snap on Linux, the browser extension will not work.
I had to change to the non-Flatpak ver of Librewolf on my Fedora PC, which sucked a little lol 😅
Have you tried fixing it using flatseal and manually changing the config folder location for the browser in keepassxc? Librewolf too, even as native package, requires that location edit
It is effectively going closed source
Shoot
How so
They don’t make any money off of the open source version. It is just a matter of the before they “discontinue” the open source version and move to source available.
If you have any doubts just look at Redis, Vagrant or Terraform
Yeah we have seen the same process many times now.
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So, Vaultwarden it is?
This seems to be clients for the end devices, which I’m worried may actually be a move towards locking out VaultWarden which will uses the BW Clients
Well, we all know how this ends…
It’s a really sad day for me, I love Bitwarden, it’s easily the best password manager I’ve used, and I’m in IT, I’ve used a bunch.
Fuck private equity, fuck it to death. But until then, I’ll be moving my test setup for KeyPassXC into production over the coming weeks and months.
I was happily subscribed to Bitwarden for years for my personal account, I moved several people and a whole company onto its platform. We had a good run, time to move on.
why not vaultwarden?
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.
Or you could just fork it when there’s a problem
As always, people overreacting in the comments (of the linked forum). So the current plan is that the core remains OSS, but upcoming features are partially not. To me that sounds similar to Chrome’s or VSCode’s approach.
Be cautious in such cases is not overreacting. We’ve seen enough open to closed rug pulls in the last years.
Fucking minIO
yeah sorry I dont want that
I’m not saying that’s great news, but it doesn’t sound like the self destruction move that some OSS companies have done recently. I wouldn’t migrate away just because of that change. In the end, they have to find a sustainable mode of operation.
They are going to slowly strip features from the free version over time.
It’s 2026 and you have way too much optimism left after all the OSS rug pulls of the last six fucking years.
Even hardware rugpulled. Fucking Micron.
Forget it; BitWarden is cooked.
