Technology

59534 readers

3209 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

486

Bitwarden switches password manager and SDK to GPL3 (www.theregister.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by ForgottenFlux@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

29 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] baatliwala@lemmy.world 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

everyone seemed to jump to conclusions.

Honestly, everyone's been so burned by companies pulling the wool over their eyes that there's just no trust left. People were happy with Mozilla 5-6 years ago and nowadays everyone is a skeptic.

You might be right in this case but they weren't wrong.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I get it, some orgs/projects do bad things, and we should absolutely roast them for it. But I believe in giving the benefit of the doubt for a period before melting down.

For example:

Mozilla - looking into ads (and have been for a few years) as an alternative revenue source to Google search; I hate ads, but the browser is still better for me than others, so I'll wait to see what they are planning
Docker - moved to a commercial tier, but their community tier is still quite viable, so I still use it; I'm experimenting w/ alternatives, but I don't need to jump ship just yet (was getting ready a few years ago when they announced the separate "community" builds)
Opera - was never FOSS, but they were a good browser when they had their own engine; that changed, so I jumped ship and went back to Firefox (had left Firefox because I wanted more than just IE/Chrome/Firefox/Safari)
Ubuntu - I used them for a while, but they kept making changes I and the community didn't like, so I bailed; this was long before the current snap nonsense, and I've stayed away ever since (switched to Fedora then Arch and now openSUSE)

When a software project you use changes for the worse, look for alternatives, but give that product time to fix it. If they continue on the negative path, then definitely bail. If everyone bails at the first hint of trouble, we end up with a ton of half-baked projects instead of a few good ones. Give feedback and support good projects.

[–] baatliwala@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago

Yep, you're right there.