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.
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. Transparency 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”.
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.
Removing ‘inclusion’ smells like a pivot to the right, same way DEI is a target for maga
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.
It’s the change from “users” and “community members” to “customers” for me.
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.
Because the “inclusive” part is already described by the first letter’s “story”?
Self hosting is the new battefront for the individual’s right to sovereign data
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.
Enshitification
That’s why you use open source alternatives everywhere :) just replace one at a time when the company fails
Start using open source then
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.
Troll better.
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).
No personally using KeePass, but I’ve heard Syncthing is great to sync the database. Might wanna try to look into that.
Update: After publication, an employee on the Bitwarden subreddit said that “Always free” had been restored on its pricing page, calling it an “oversight” by the marketing team. The product page for Bitwarden’s personal password manager remains unchanged.
Oversight
They got community checked and backtracked hard… I have always endorsed bitwarden but that is becoming worrisome. :(
Yeah, you know those marketing team people. They totally went out of their way to make more work for themselves to change it with I’m sure zero instructions from higher up to do so.
Getting hard to endorse anyone you don’t personally know at this point.
We’re sorry we got caught
Well, it was fun while it lasted, lol.
I’ve long wondered when this was going to happen. Their investors must have been frustrated about the lack of revenue per user growth (eg, screwing us over with annual price hikes and removing features from free plan)
“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.
why even have “Motto” if you are just going to renege on it.
In this case, 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.
I just installed Bitwarden because 979 2FA started refusing to show my codes unless I set up a password and fingerprint (and fails when I try anyway). Now to find something else I guess.
I knew trouble was brewing when they started adding the little corporate cute waving graphics and stuff to the UI. Glad I already migrated away
What are u using? I just got onto Bitwarden and set up all my credentials there!
I’m just using
passon Linux. Haven’t figured out a good way to access my passwords through it on mobile yet, but I avoid using my smartphone when at all possible so I haven’t been particularly motivated to find a solution to thatI was about to and also interested
If things turn for the worse, hopefully Vaultwarden can fork the client as well
Get out now
Try keepass on self hosted sandstorm
Can keepass do passkeys?
It does but some of my passkeys didn’t work after migrating my bitwarden database
I don’t think so, but sandstorm can as of a few weeks ago (might not be in main branch yet)
I just went all in to bitwarden 🙃. Not ready to change again just yet but will be ready probably once it starts going to shit.
I upgraded to premium last year. Never heard about the price increase until this article. But frankly the change in leadership is more concerning to me than that.
Well, it could be forked of course. The self-hosted version at least.
Gr8. Yet another critical service soon to be gobbled up by PE. I guess I’m moving to Proton Pass.
Experienced this with 1 Password. Experienced this with Enpass in another way. Really doesn’t want to experience this with Bitwarden especially because of self-hosting. Let’s hold thumbs but, apparently, it was fun while it lasted…
I’m curious what your problem with enpass was? I got lifetime cheap back when lastpass went to hell and as far as I can tell with Wifi sync they could go out of business entirely and I could still use it.
