Bitwarden introduced a non-free dependency to their clients. The Bitwarden CTO tried to frame this as a bug but his explanation does not really make it any less concerning.
Perhaps it is time for alternative Bitwarden-compatible clients. An open source client that’s not based on Electron would be nice. Or move to something else entirely? Are there any other client-server open source password managers?
BitWarden already has lots of clients. There’s also VaultWarden for the server if you want.
This is being blown a bit out of proportion though. All they are saying is the official SDK may have some non-free components going forward. So what? It’s a private company, they can do what they want. Or the community can just fork it and move forward with a free one if they want, but it’s just not going to be in the official BitWarden clients. Hardly news or a big deal.
I can only speak for myself, but I would never trust opaque, proprietary software to manage my credentials, especially in a networked environment. For me, that’s a total showstopper.
I’ve never had need to use Bitwarden or Vaultwarden as I’ve always been happy with KeePass, but this news would definitely have me choosing an alternative.
I always found it weird for people to recommend BitWarden … it just FELT like a company that’ll go completely off track sooner or later. And it did. Oh wonder. KeePass ftw!
BitWarden already has lots of clients.
Does it? I’d be very much interested to know. I’ve been looking for other clients before, because I didn’t like the sluggishness of the Electron client, but couldn’t find any usable clients at all. There are some projects on Github, none of which seemed to be in a usable state. Perhaps I have been missing something.
This is being blown a bit out of proportion though. All they are saying is the official SDK may have some non-free components going forward. So what? It’s a private company, they can do what they want. Or the community can just fork it and move forward with a free one if they want, but it’s just not going to be in the official BitWarden clients. Hardly news or a big deal.
Nobody said that they can’t do that (although people rightfully questioned that their changes are indeed comatible with the GPLv3). I very much disagree that this isn’t a big deal, though.
I use Keyguard on my phone. Loving it so far. Mostly focused on Android but also available for all major platforms.
