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.
And I’m certain that it has served as the catalyst for the bitwarden decision.
I disagree, but unfortunately, we will probably never know. That said, I’m not against the outrage, I’m just against the conclusions. You don’t need to immediately abandon a project at the slightest hint they’re moving in a direction you don’t like, what you should do is start watching that project a bit more closely to see if they correct or they make additional changes you don’t like.
We should be taking the rational approach instead of the reactionary approach, but social media in general seems to love reacting instead. I’ve abandoned projects that went a direction I don’t like, but I usually give them a few months after the first sign of problems. I’m currently doing that w/ Mozilla and I want to see what they do with their advertising push before jumping ship.