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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Sure. The majority of the BitWarden client is licensed under the GPL, which categorizes it as “free software”. However, one of the dependencies titled “BitWarden-SDK” was licensed under a different proprietary license which didn’t allow re-distribution of the SDK. For the most part, this was never a problem as FOSS package maintainers didn’t include the dependency (as it was optional) and were able to compile the various clients and keep the freedoms granted by the GPL license. However, a recent change made BitWarden-SDK a required dependency, which violated freedom 0 (the freedom to distribute the code as you please). BitWarden CTO came out and said this was an error and fixed this, making BitWarden SDK an optional dependency once again which now makes BitWarden free software again. For the average joe, this wouldn’t have mattered as BitWarden SDK contains features that are usually favored by businesses and the average Joe can live without. So everything now returns back to normal, hopefully.














  • For the license to be changed every team member needs to submit a written agreement that he agrees to the change, otherwise their contributions must be removed as they were written under a different license, the only exception is usually permissive licenses such as MIT/BSD 3 clause.

    Usually, to rugpull FOSS contributors, companies who maintain FOSS software ask contributors to sign a CLA which waives their rights and lets the control their contributions. Immich isn’t doing any of that, and it will likely remain AGPL forever because changing the license will be a big hassle for them with the amount of contributors.