Bitwarden Unwarranted Panic

Last weekend I started seeing a lot of people I follow either posting or boosting posts about Bitwarden no longer being open source. I did a bit of Googling and, at the time, the only news story I could find was this story from Phoronix about Bitwarden. It wasn’t quite clear exactly what was going on. I waited all week for Ars Technica to cover the issue, but unless I missed it, they never covered it. So I was confused - was this a real issue or people panicking on social media? Then I saw this video by Brodie Robertson:

As usual, Brodie took a calm approach to explore the issue from all angles and show his research. Basically, as Brodie shows, this was mostly a bunch of panic about nothing. Bitwarden has been slightly shady in touting its software as open source when it would be more accurate to call it open core. There are open source components, but the parts that make them money are closed source or at least have licenses that don’t comport with true open source licenses. While it’s not awesome, it appears there’s no real reason to panic or go nuts about this.

• Bitwarden
• Password-Manager