I think it is unlikely that they are simply bad at PR and not trying to do damage control for something they would like to push anyways eventually. Why are they creating a proprietary element in the first place? Is the selling point of their product not that it is open source? They are making some changes.

…or they made an honest mistake and don’t care to put it back on F-droid for reasons to which we are not privy.

An honest mistake of hosting their entire own repo and writing up documents for it? It isn’t just off F-Droid, they are doing their own thing.

I bring up these counter-examples not as a way to point out where I’m right and you’re wrong, but to point out that there are other candidate explanations, and it’s not justified to infer that malfeasance is the only likely possibility.

Yes you are suggesting that people give them the benefit of the doubt. And I am saying that would be unreasonable given the facts.

I also understand why you would cynically think that Bitwarden might succumb to Capitalism—I too live in a late-stage-capitalism country—but that’s not a forgone conclusion, and I say again that we don’t need to be imagining villains when there’s plenty of objectively real ones at which to point a finger alreadIy

Bitwarden has already succumbed to capitalism, it is a product by and for a for-profit company. It is, with few exceptions, just a question of when they will have a profitability crisis and need to find avenues by which to increase revenues or decrease costs. Sometimes that takes 15-20 years, sometimes it takes 3.

I have not followed their finances but I would be curious to know what they are doing at the moment. Could be seeking to get bought out, could be looking for new funding, could be working around the needs of a major client, could be something else.

As always, when a project is backed by a company we should approach it tentatively because while they will provide support for it for some time they will eventually be tempted to do something shady to increase profit. Or to just be profitable at all, which investors always want ASAP when interest rates are high. And then we will need to fork it and see if it is feasible without VC backing. To my knowledge the only other viable path for an open source company is to become an industry standard where the major monopolies decide to not fight about it and instead say, “it is fine as it is and won’t be profitable but it is a useful thing to share costs on”. Docker, Inc. is somewhere along that path, scraping together products at the periphery of the software while the industry monopolies more or less share the core project in its various compatible forms. And Docker similarly tried to ham-fistedly seek profit sources like when it tried a silly fee scheme for Dockerhub and created a small exodus that the monopolies ate up (e.g. GitHub).

Of course you inherently cannot trust a private company to keep their product open, including open core models. In that situation everyone using or contributing should be making a gamble: that if they go too far the project will be forked, the company will cut its community in two, and the fotk will go on to be decently successful as a community project.

Their inability to do the right PR things is just a signal that they can’t be bothered with the facade that is useful for them to maintain community support and FOSS nerd marketing for their product.

Re: ethics, they are no longer on F-Droid because they tried to get this in under the radar and include non-free code in builds. Instead of fixing that problem they made their own repo.

Bitwarden will likely eventually destroy their FOSS model for profit-seeking, it is just a matter of when. This is how these things work.

Our feudal patrons are so stingy!

Not trusting a company that has been quietly undermining open source builds of their android client and being cagey + using guarded and laconic PR speak on this is not fallacious thinking, it is just recognizing behaviors and knowing why a company would be doing that. These companies hire people to craft responses and otherwise manage their “community”, and providing no assurances of permanently open clients when they tried to pull this is an intentional omission.

Yes because it is about, ultimately, making the major clients incompatible with vaultwarden on both a legal and technical level.

A likely outcome if they don’t reverse course is a split where FOSS Nerfs fork the clients and have to maintain their own versions. That’s the outcome Bitwarden wants. This reeks of a bazinga, “how dare they benefit from our work and take our users”, which is hilarious for a FOSS ecosystem that almost universally benefits corporations with free labor.

They’re trying to argue legal technicalities because acknowledging that they’re trying to reduce compatibility with servers like vaultwarden would be bad PR.

Per their new license, anyone that uses their SDK to build a client cannot say, “this is for Bitwarden and compatible servers like vaultwarden”. They cannot support those other servers, per their license. Anyone that gets suckered into using their SDK now becomes a force against alternative implementations.

If you own the copyright then yes this is 100% legal.

There are already apps that are like this. They usually add a couple features to the paid release so that people feel like they are getting something extra for the money. The good ones will eventually move those features to the open release eventually. However, this incentivizes keeping part of the app closed source so that nobody can just rename and re-release the paid version.

It is 100% up to you for how to handle these tradeoffs. Personally, I think so long as you are principled and ready for some criticism - and can handle it gracefully - getting paid for work that builds your open source app is a very good idea. We don’t all have the luxury of maintaining high quality unpaid side projects!