Cool.
I just started using Bitwarden almost a year now. I don’t know how I lived without it before? It’s nice to know I wont have to switch to something else.
I’ve been using it for years, I’m so glad I don’t have to switch
I’m nerdy enough to use bitwarden but not nerdy enough to truly understand this.
Can someone explain it like I’m 5?
Sure. The majority of the BitWarden client is licensed under the GPL, which categorizes it as “free software”. However, one of the dependencies titled “BitWarden-SDK” was licensed under a different proprietary license which didn’t allow re-distribution of the SDK. For the most part, this was never a problem as FOSS package maintainers didn’t include the dependency (as it was optional) and were able to compile the various clients and keep the freedoms granted by the GPL license. However, a recent change made BitWarden-SDK a required dependency, which violated freedom 0 (the freedom to distribute the code as you please). BitWarden CTO came out and said this was an error and fixed this, making BitWarden SDK an optional dependency once again which now makes BitWarden free software again. For the average joe, this wouldn’t have mattered as BitWarden SDK contains features that are usually favored by businesses and the average Joe can live without. So everything now returns back to normal, hopefully.
Now could you explain it like I’m 4?
Free software had a non-free extra bit that it technically didn’t need. Accidentally got changed to need the non-free part in order to run which caused news stories. Now the change has been reverted so it’s free again.
Now could you explain it like I’m 3?
Free cookie recipe not really free because oopsie! Man fixed it now. Cookie recipe is free again! Yay!
deleted by creator
Removed by mod
Now could you explain it like I’m 2?
NO, LouNeko! No touchy non-FOSS.
You don’t know any 5yo software engineers?
This seems like classic corporate backtracking when their customers spot a terrible, deliberate decision.
That being said, I am happy about it. I got my company to use it and finally got my girlfriend to use it and just recommended it to her brother. Would hate to have to try to find something else
This seems like classic corporate backtracking when their customers spot a terrible, deliberate decision.
I didn’t think that’s the case here
However, would you rather that the feedback of users NOT change behavior? I’m not entirely sure what your end game is here, you WANT corporations to ignore and not take action on feedback?
I don’t think so, to be honest. The bitwarden-sdk had been there for a VERY long time and you could always compile without it. Not being able to build a FOSS client wouldn’t hurt bitwarden’s bottom line too much. Most people use whatever is provided in the app stores (which is compiled with the source available sdk).
I was really sceptical of the CTOs first response, but this does actually seem to be genuinely good news.
Initially Bitwarden was one of the most impressive FOSS password managers, but their increasing willingness to trade user privacy for services and promotion by our favorite surveillance capitalist’s is the real issue imho. Believing Privacy and Security are inextricably linked, I cannot recommend, nor use them at this time.
A quick scan on Blacklight (TheMarkup’s Privacy Tool) is an eye opener.
This is an interesting tool that I’m going to back pocket, so thanks for that. That being said, any trackers and such on Bitwarden.com root page isn’t really indicative of the real product, though I’ll say it reflects poorly. That page basically is a sales pitch put together by probably a completely separate marketing team.
Blacklight is basically a front-end for DuckDuckGo’s open source tracker radar tool. https://github.com/duckduckgo/tracker-radar
In a world increasing dominated by surveillance capitalists and dystopian tech, conscientious consumerism is one of the most effective tools we still have to effect change. Google chooses to sell tech to a Far-Right government’s engaged in ethnic cleansing, Bitwarden chooses Google as a business partner for analytics, marketing, cloud services, etc… I choose to not use Bitwarden.
Another resource to assist in choosing which services to use is the open project PrivacySpy. Bitwarden doesn’t score very well by their metrics either.
First Winamp and now Bitwarden. The open source ecosystem is truly dead /s.
You didn’t read it then.
Wow, /s has really lost its meaning on the internet 😂
except that the case of winamp and bitwarden couldn’t be more different.
If you think the meaning is “funny joke, upvotes to the left”, no, it never meant that.
If you thnk they accidentally made a proprietary module, I have a bridge to sell you
If you don’t understand how easily this happens, you don’t understand how licenses work or the interplay involved in licensing packages, frameworks, and miscellaneous dependencies.
I’ve been programming for 20 years and have never seen this happen without a project manager wanting it to happen, I have however seen people lie about unpopular changes and call them bugs a whole bunch
Corporate lies to hide unpopular changes is basically the soup of the day. Every day. For as long as I can remember. I’m an old elephant.
Why would anyone trust any company with their passwords??
Just use keepass and not bother with BS
Because most people need a cloud solution for synchronization across devices. Unless you’re spinning up your own service like Nextcloud or similar for this, relying on a commercial cloud storage service for storing the file is just as dangerous (perhaps more so, as your attack surface is now across two third party services) as relying on someone like Bitwarden or Lastpass.
There’s a big difference. You trust entities like bitwarden/lastpass/etc to properly encrypt the data, protect your master key, and trust their entire architecture behind the scenes.
When you encrypt the keepass DB that’s all done by you locally with a open source client. No one knows your master key, and you get a simple encrypted file. You can hand that file to hackers if you want, will be useless without the key.
I put one of the copies of my keepass on onedrive, and syncs perfectly across all devices.
Companies can enshiffity at a moments notice.
Lol, imagine ridiculing users for trusting an FOSS company to handle their password management, and then storing your encrypted password DB in Microsoft’s OneDrive 😆
encrypted is the key word
I knew a comment like this was coming, but unless you can show how microsoft can decrypt my kdbx I stand fully by my current setup.
I don’t think Microsoft can decrypt your DB file, neither do I think Bitwarden can. Encryption happens locally on their open source clients too.
But I’m not the one disparaging trusting an open source program to securely encrypt passwords, you are.
And you are aware that bitwarden knows nothing about the passwords inside the vault and the vault is encrypted in zero knowledge type of fashion?
AND that Bitwarden does external audits?
AND if you loose your master password you are out of luck as they can’t support you helping crack the decryption?Except for the part that it’s not a question of trust (being open source), there’s no third-party architecture to trust (it can and should be self-hosted), the data on the server are also encrypted client-side before leaving your device, sure.
Oh, and you also get proper sync, no risk of desync if two devices gets a change while offline without having to go check your in-house sync solution, easy share between user (still with no trust needed in the server), all working perfectly with good user UI integration for almost every systems.
Yeah, I wonder why people bother using that, instead of deploying clunky, single-user solution.
Bitwarden can be fully self hosted, I’m doing it. My Bitwarden server doesn’t (and can’t) talk to them at all as it has no way to access the internet. They know nothing about my deployment except that I signed up for a free license key.
Are you a software developer ? Because you are way out of touch with what users want.
I get why you’d suggest the previous commenter is out of touch with what users want, but what does that have to do with being a software engineer?
A joke about shitty developers.
I used to use Keepass and sync thing and would consistently run into conflicts between my desktop and mobile entries. Maybe there’s a better way to do it that I’m missing, but that was very annoying
I use this setup for my personal passwords, using nextcloud as the sync solution. A semi-fix for that was using Keepass2Android (on Android obviously). It integrates with nextcloud directly, keep a local DB of passwords, and would only load the remote one (and merge) on unlock and updates, not keeping it “constantly” sync on every remote change. It works well… most of the time… with only two devices that almost always have connection to the server… and for only one user.
It’s overly clunky though. It’s the big advantage of “service based” password manager against “single file based” ones. They handle sync. We have plans to move to bitwarden at my workplace, and since the client supports multiple accounts on multiple servers, I’ll probably move to that for personal stuff too. The convenience is just there, without downside.
Well, who did you trust to build your hardware?
