How long after a public sale will Bitwarden clients keep compatible with Vaultwarden? The new owners could put a check in all clients on the first day of ownership if they wanted, and Vaultwarden would immediately be obselete and useless.
I wonder if Bitwarden shit on everyone, how long it would take for Vaultwarden specific clients to appear. A browser extension would be pretty simple, app store apps are a bit more complicated because of the pay-to-play aspects.
The problem is once Vaultwarden clients appear, then Vaultwarden becomes its own complete system and is no longer able to rely on the good reputation of Bitwarden. Plus developing clients for multiple browsers and OSes is a lot more difficult than just keeping a back end up to date.
If they went this path I think I would jump ship to a paid service.
As soon as they break compatibility with the official clients, it becomes much tougher. Even though the current versions can be forked, the whole system is set up to work against any kind of grassroots effort to maintain an open source version.
Apple and Google being the gatekeepers for all mobile app distribution is a real pain point. Without the clout of a big brand name the risk of being unable to distribute apps goes up.
Vaultwarden relies on the goodwill of Bitwarden to allow it to use its clients for compatibility. I would wager a new owner looking for money would block that pretty soon after buying the company.
Again, for how long? The answers to all the questions seems to be the same. If Bitwarden was sold they could remove all of this free functionality and interoperability with 3rd party clients immediately.
Then you could say well Vaultwarden will work with these forked clients, but then you are placing your security into the hands of multiple different open source maintainers and vaultwarden then has nothing to do with Bitwarden and becomes some random back end + some random 3rds party clients.
Sure, but vaultwarden as a system would be entirely usable, I don't think a lot of it is really relying on the bitwarden compatibility for much more than a little convenience.
Useable yes, but trustable? Not without some serious backing and regular auditing from some public security experts.
IMO that fact that the existing Vaultwarden system relies on Bitwarden clients and therefore caries Bitwardens secure reputation is its main selling point. Take that away and Vaultwarden is nothing more than some random back end software that can not really be trusted.