Concerns Raised Over Bitwarden Moving Further Away From Open-Source

Several Phoronix readers have written in this Sunday over concerns of Bitwarden further moving away from open-source. Bitwarden is a password management service that leverages an encrypted vault and supports multiple clients/platforms. Bitwarden operates on a freemium model and has provided some code as open-source while there are new concerns over Bitwarden further pivoting away from open-source.

In particular, following a recent pull request to the Bitwarden client that introduces a “bitwarden/sdk-internal” dependency to build the desktop client, there is the following clause on the license statement:

“You may not use this SDK to develop applications for use with software other than Bitwarden (including non-compatible implementations of Bitwarden) or to develop another SDK.”

The issue of this effectively not making the Bitwarden client free software was raised in this GitHub issue. Other users have chimed in being concerned over this change and the SDK not being legally permitted for use outside of Bitwarden proper.

Bitwarden founder and CTO Kyle Spearrin has commented on the ticket this morning:

Thanks for sharing your concerns here. We have been progressing use of our SDK in more use cases for our clients. However, our goal is to make sure that the SDK is used in a way that maintains GPL compatibility.

1. the SDK and the client are two separate programs

2. code for each program is in separate repositories

3. the fact that the two programs communicate using standard protocols does not mean they are one program for purposes of GPLv3

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.

The ticket was subsequently locked and limited to collaborators. We’ll see what comes ahead for Bitwarden and open-source.