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.
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.
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.