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.

  • BassTurd@lemmy.worldEnglish
    27·
    2 months ago

    I’m so glad this happened. I really wanted to believe them when they said it was an error and would corrected. It appears that in relatively short order they addressed the issue, gave an explanation, an expectation, then nailed it. I hate when I recommend something, then have to backtrack because they changed.

  • radamant@lemmy.worldEnglish
    33·
    2 months ago

    I think I’m still switching to keepassxc, but I’ll still recommend bitwarden to normal people (and my bitwarden account is paid til 2027 anyway, lol)

  • penquin@lemm.eeEnglish
    1043·
    2 months ago

    Call me cynical, but I don’t think it was a “packaging bug”. I think they felt the backlash from their users. I mean, it’s still great and now I’ll go back to using their app.

    • BearOfaTime@lemm.eeEnglish
      23·
      2 months ago

      There was a really good explanation by a rando about how it happened. Seems a dev made a mistake when publishing a change.

      Apparently bitwarden immediately changed internal procedure for publishing changes.