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Bitwarden New CEO has extensive M&A, Private equity experience, Removes Transparency from its Motto
(www.fastcompany.com)
this post was submitted on 15 May 2026
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Why people bother with any corporate software when it really don't provide much more than completely FOSS alternatives
It is FOSS.
And securely hosting a password manager that is accessible over WAN links is beyond the capability of most users.
What generic cloud storage do you trust?
It is an encrypted file using AES-256 so unless your threat model is state actors dedicating a data center to brute forcing it, it's probably ok mostly anywhere.
Bitwarden is completely FOSS, both client and server
Not if you are being strict with the definition of FOSS.
Free and open source
Is free? Yep
Is OSS? Yep
Is it full libre? I think not, right? And I assume that is your actual issue with it?
FOSS is a standardized term. As the Free Software Foundation defines it:
You are not granted right to modify or distribute Bitwarden. You can inspect and use that to build your own. That is what Vaultwarden does.
Well, the client code is liensed GPL 3.0 and server code is licensed AGPL 3.0, and those are both FOSS licenses. There are some additional commercial components licensed under a non-FOSS source-available license, but those are not required for the basic service. I guess you can't use the Bitwarden trademark either. I would still consider Bitwarden FOSS, although with a slightly limited (but not crippling) scope of the term "Bitwarden".
So you wanna say it's Source-Available, yes?
All I say is that it's not FOSS in the strict sense.
Neither the OSI definition, nor the FSF definition require you to allow your trademark to be used freely, nor do they require you to only host FOSS software for your FOSS software to qualify as such. The client and server software published as GPL and APL qualify as FOSS by both orgs that define the term. Vaultwarden is better for self hosting specifically because it is superior software for self hosting.