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 tried convincing people to give them the benefit of the doubt and see what they do, but no, everyone seemed to jump to conclusions.
Glad my trust wasn’t misplaced this time. I have been and continue to be a paying customer.
And I’m certain that it has served as the catalyst for the bitwarden decision.