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.
I will remember this, even more so because of the confused drama that preceded it. In general, I find it difficult for me to endorse any commercial entity, but Bitwarden has my admiration and I will continue to offer it as a better alternative to people I see storing their passwords in Chrome or Lastpass. I’m also happy to pay a bit to support a good product and will continue to support the development even if I switch to self-hosted at some point.