Hacker News Reader

Comment by solarkraft | Hacker News Reader

I’m relieved. Maybe the company would have survived this somehow, but they sure wouldn’t have been the techies’ darling anymore and that was going to be expensive.

I hope they realized that being FOSS is their moat and it nets them a lot of goodwill (it’s the whole reason I bother with their not-quite-the-best product in the first place). The bold claim „the most trusted password manager“ was kind of justifiable while it was FOSS (if we don’t count keepass), without it not at all.

I’m still not sure how I feel about them now. I can now somewhat trust that the applications will remain free software, but trust in the company has eroded a bit. I still haven’t seen official communication about this.

View on HN

I'm cautiously optimistic, but still concerned about the long term.

* I just don't see how taking $100 million can be good for users in the long run. By far the most likely outcomes are bloat or enshittification.

* bitwarden does not appear to be very forkable, ie it's a complex system written in C#. The existence of Vaultwarden helps a lot with this, but what about the client apps? Forkability is the second most important protection against user-hostile action, behind being open source in the first place.

I hope it works out. I'm a recent adopter of bitwarden, and so far the UX has blown keepass out of the water.

The client apps can pretty easily be forked and maintained. We probably wouldn't see much feature growth but I also don't think we need that so much. Lots of OSS projects have been messed up by fundraising and communities often just fork them and keep them around so I'm not too worried. Besides, garbage features could probably just be unsupported by Vaultwarden, which has worked extremely well for me and been nothing but stable.

I hope that they keep it a password manager and don’t try to turn it into a “security multitool” or something. I like it how it is. They’ve been careful about adding things and I appreciate that. If they wanted to say move from an electron app to a qt or tauri app I could appreciate that as well.

The UX of Bitwarden is pretty lacking compared to 1Password. I finally made the switch after years of Bitwarden because of the vast UX improvements.

For one, it's much easier and natural to add additional pieces of information on entries in 1Password. Bitwarden's implementation of this always feels like a poorly integrated afterthought.

The UX is exactly the reason why a stayed away from Bitwarden.

Eh it’s not as good as never having the OSS’ness of it challenged but it also shows they’re open to feedback and willing to reassess when customers get out the pitchforks and torches. It’s a story as old as time.

the gh or had official communication. it was obviously a dep issue blown out of proportion

Reply on news.ycombinator.com