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by skjoldr 1002 days ago
"Commercial.Core and SSO integration: Code for certain new modules that are designed and developed for use by larger organizations and enterprise environments is released under the Bitwarden License, a "source available" license."

The rest of Bitwarden is free both as in beer and as in speech. Dunno why you think otherwise. Vaultwarden exists, and Bitwarden clients are compatible with it.
1 comments
wmal 1002 days ago
Thank you, and other people, for mentioning Vaultwarden. I’ll check that out. This is, however, a separate software package, coming from different people, so not related to my question.

Bitwarden is not free as in speech, as it requires me to register with Bitwarden, Inc and get a license key to be able to self host. Also, then it uses some closed cloud services.

As for the free as in beer - this is more nuanced, but I still think it is far from free. For individuals - hosting something that requires 2-4 GB of RAM [1] is definitely not free. For companies - hosting something that doesn’t include SSO is pointless. The Bitwarden source available license, that includes SSO, does not allow production use [2], and requires a paid subscription instead.

BTW I completely understand the reasons to not open source everything. What I don’t understand is: why not use the source available Bitwarden license for the entire server codebase?

[1]: https://bitwarden.com/help/install-on-premise-linux/

[2]: https://github.com/bitwarden/server/blob/master/LICENSE_FAQ....

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skjoldr 997 days ago
> Bitwarden is not free as in speech, as it requires me to register with Bitwarden, Inc and get a license key to be able to self host.

That is not the right understanding of the term "free" because the code is completely open-source and you can remove the parts that have to do with registration and enterprise features yourself without breaking the license agreement. You would have to maintain such a fork on your own though. It would be easier if Bitwarden Inc. themselves would maintain a completely open-sourced version and an open core version with non-free parts and registration, but they are not obligated to do so.

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