I find this move concerning, and wish that the Founder had looked for a new CEO that shared his values rather than a Private Equity and Mergers Expert.
Furthermore, the change to the GRIT motto is worrying. Trust is useless without Transparency when it comes to code and security.
I swear, equity is literaly just pure evil, allowed to thrive only due to lack of force opposing it.
Great. Now I have to move all of my password to another services because of a stupid decision made by a company.
How good or bad is a move to Proton Pass?
Self hosting is the new battefront for the individual’s right to sovereign data
I guess I won’t be recommending Botwarden to normies anymore.
“Equity” or “Capital” = the kiss of death
Great I bought a paid subscription for it all this time for it to end up like this, I’m done with anything that is not self hosted now on, I’ll just convert my old laptop into a home server
This. At this rate everything that has growth and not open source is just a resource to exploit.
I guess it’s time to move to vaultwarden sooner rather than later… This wasn’t supposed to be the weekend project, but fuck it; let’s roll with it!
My question is move to vaultwarden, and trust they will still develop the open source client apps, or just preemptively move to another system. The UX isnt perfect, but it seems a lot easier to use than kerpassxc. Time to do some research.
Very easy to migrate to vaultwarden from bitwarden I think, so I’d probably do that and hope the clients are forked if ever needed. I’d probably just live with vaultwardens web ui before swapping completely to keepassxc (because setting up keepass db sync to all devices manually doesn’t sound fun).
why even have “Motto” if you are just going to renege on it.
In this case, having not having a motto would have made them able to get further down the enshittification path before anyone noticed. They just warned us.
though this also points out why such things as companies having “values” is laughable and should be ridiculed if they arent clearly enforced. All they do is scam people into thinking they might not be explitative shits which shouldnt be allowed or looked kindly upon.
So many people have to switch services now and even more will just become victims of the company after it becomes more shitty. All those people could have used some other service that is less likely to go shitty, which in turn would have given it more resources to improve.
This is not great but the strength of vaultwarden on the back of the bitwarden brand will give us forked clients as soon as they stop allowing self-hosters to set their instance.
The company has long defined its values with the acronym “GRIT,” which used to stand for “Gratitude, Responsibility, Inclusion, and Transparency.” After May 4, it changed the acronym to stand for “Gratitude, Responsibility, Innovation, and Trust.”
It’s not as bad as the headline seems. Trust is still in the motto. The actual change is:
But still. Why change it at all? Why replace “inclusion” with “innovation”?
It smells like Tech Bro.
There’s just no way to spin that positively, even giving them the benefit of the doubt, especially since they aren’t rolling it back. Someone spent effort to make that values change, so its not an accident nor a “nothingburger”.
It’s the change from “users” and “community members” to “customers” for me.
I don’t need my password manager to innovate anything. I would very much like it to include support for all of my tools and machines though.
Ty. So many comments here didn’t see your post and others did but didn’t read it. My take is innovation is a greater priority, and trust protocols. I’ll watch but I’ll wait for it to be a something burger.
Removing ‘inclusion’ smells like a pivot to the right, same way DEI is a target for maga
Because the “inclusive” part is already described by the first letter’s “story”?
Well, trust is literally the oposite of transparency. So i would call it quite bad, especially if you consider that right now i trust these guys with my credit card details, my taxID, all my passwords.
Exactly. In cybersec, trust is someting you try to avoid or at least minimize. Trying to use it as a selling point is ridiculous.
Or it’s something you earn through transparency.
That’s what they are trying to communicate here, yes. But 8.5 million users didn’t need to be told they need to trust the platform, they chose to. As did I with a premium plan to cover MFA and attachments.
Now with business types in charge and a hidden doubling of the fees, that’s more than halfway out the window no matter what the website stands for. I’m guessing somebody decided it’s time to cash in on the goodwill they built over the past decade.
That’s a great point.
I don’t want to trust them either. I don’t want to have to.
The only “devil’s advocate” argument I can think of is they’re trying to appeal to enterprise clients (who would not know that and want to “trust” a security company). That would explain the “I” change: “inclusion” (sadly) sounds political, “innovation” is like corporate catnip. Bitwarden could be trying to attract big fish to fund development, having their cake an eating it.
If things turn for the worse, hopefully Vaultwarden can fork the client as well
Ah for fuck’s sake. Seems like every month I have to change something because some fucking company starts getting a taste for greed via data sucking. I’m goddamn sick of it.
That’s why you use open source alternatives everywhere :) just replace one at a time when the company fails
Start using open source then
Troll better.
Unprompted snark from an .ml user, how surprising. I am a bigger cheerleader for open source than any of my friends or family. It’s the only real path to stay free of corporate influence, greed, and spying (in regards to software). Live free or die.
Bitwarden is, by definition, open source. It has been since I started using it ~6 years ago. I’m tired of literally everything having the potential for enshittification. Nothing is safe in the long run, not even volunteer-run projects. If you think your favorite project is safe because of some “core ethos” or “guiding principles”, you’re just drinking the kool-aid. As long as we exist under capitalism, anything under the sun can be enshittified.
I will never give up, even if things seem even more dire than they are now. But I’m tired of having to maintain constant vigilance.
Enshitification
So does this affect vaultwarden at all?
Vaultwarden benefits from the development ideas in Bitwarden server, and especially the client app ecosystem that I am sure costs a small fortune to maintain. To go alone, vaultwarden will have a lot of work ahead of them and need to maintain a development community capable of maintaining the whole thing.
It will as there is not an VW official OS client nor browser plugin. It is undoubtedly a fucked state of affairs.
Always happens eventually. You can run Vaultwarden yourself if you have a homelab you trust so passwords never disappears.
