Concerns Raised over Bitwarden Moving Further Away from Open-Source

Open source developers should think twice before accepting VC funding. The VC then own them.

I'm paying for BitWarden because I want to support them. But it's pretty clear that they're backsliding.

This is understandable, the password manager market is saturated and implementing new features like Passkeys is far from trivial.

Still, they are the only real option for a one-click mostly open source password manager that works across all the major platforms and that supports modern features.

Recent and related:

Bitwarden is no longer free software - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41893994 - Oct 2024 (71 comments)

I was concerned about BitWarden when it started copying or acting like 1Password. Their marketing text, features, etc., are similar. I understand there isn’t much to differentiate between Password Management tools. BitWarden was supposed to be the Open-Source alternative to 1Password and better than Keepass.

I’m a customer of both services. I started with 1Password since its early days and have been using the family plan for the past 5+ years.

I used BitWarden when starting with Teams, as it is cheaper and presumably scalable. I hope that if things grow up, we can either host it ourselves or the pricing is affordable enough.

If Bitwarden becomes as “successful” as 1Password, people/companies will actually just use 1Password.

I think, now, the idea would be to start moving all critical ones to Keepass; and use a better UX client on top of the database.

I never understood the appeal of web-based password managers. KeePass all the way, all offline, no randomly changing UI, everything in a single .db file. Need syncing? Use Cloud storage service.

Related:

Bitwarden is no longer free software

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41893994

BitWarden leaves open source community https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41896750

I wonder when they are going to start blocking official clients from using things like vaultwarden.

What alternatives do you recommend?

So there's nothing.

> Being able to build the app as you are trying to do here is an issue we plan to resolve and is merely a bug.

Tempest in a teapot.

What about reporting a bug and chill? Instead of immediately jumping the gun and flooding the issue tracker of the one company that still tries with preaching? What is this going to achieve? Of course they locked it. Shame on everyone who commented some RMS-inspired lament into their issue queue.

Ongoing thread that points to gasp the actual GitHub issue and not some rando site's take https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41893994

I left Bitwarden as soon as they started using dark patterns in their UI. They got in the way instead of enhancing the user experience.

This is disappointing. I use gopass for my personal passwords, but had moved family passwords to Bitwarden, and selected that hosted provide becauser it was open source.

I will continue to vote with my wallet, with other open-first solutions like ente and etesync.

Part of why I do this is so that if the company changes direction, the community can potentially fill in.

With the momentum behind vaultgarden, maybe open clients will flourish too.

Disappointing that a website that touts itself for, among other things, "Open Source News", is missing the core definition issue in that headline: what is at issue here has zero to do with how open or closed the source code is. It's only related to how free/libre the license is.

That's a big deal to some, no doubt, but it's important to be precise about language in cases like this, especially since folks will undoubtedly assume that this means secret user-hostile things will now be embedded in the source code, sight-unseen.