Bitwarden is no longer free software

Earlier, open source was about creativity, innovation, curiosity and sharing that with a wider ecosystem as a reactionary movement to closed walls that hinder curious minds to look under the hood how things exactly work.

Lately, it seems like open source is mostly a marketing gimmick of gathering free traction early on without spending tons of money on advertising and then later gradually pulling the rug.

Examples galore. At this point, I'd assume any open source project in past five to eight years taking this trajectory at any point.

Open source software by organizations is at risk of becoming not open. Open source software by individuals is still fine, however.

Until those individuals form a company around their project.

More specifically, it is large VC funding or private equity ownership that does it in. As I see it, not having a lean operation, growing the company and expenses too fast without a commensurate growth in revenue and in profit, is the root of the evil. In contrast, a lean self-bootstrapped firm ought to be much less at risk of becoming not open.

True, VCs and private equity wherever they touch, things will change. These companies would love to build their empires on open source libraries, tools, frameworks and languages off the efforts of such individuals but would not give back enough and in most cases nothing at all.

This imbalance needs to be recognised.

> In contrast, a lean self-bootstrapped firm ought to be much less at risk of becoming not open.

Sadly, in my direct experience, VC-backed competitors will just use the bootstrapped firm's open source work as free R&D. Or even use their bootstrapped open source code in a way which directly competes with the bootstrapped business. And they'll hire marketers and directly target the bootstrapped firm's customer base.

When the bootstrapper complains, the VC-backed companies all just proclaim "You shouldn't have chosen an open source license if you didn't want this to happen!" ... which is correct legally (the licenses don't prohibit this behavior), but blatantly ignores the complete destruction of the social contract which makes independent / bootstrapped open source possible.

More like having the open source community report bugs, feature requests (ideas) and code until the product is good enough to transition into full commercial.

AGPL prevents this easily, the reason this happens so often seems to be that way too many devs default to MIT/Apache and other way too permissive licenses and are then surprised when that permissiveness is used against them.

Nope, AGPL actually doesn’t protect a bootstrapper from most of these problems. For example:

* If your monetization model involves a SaaS version of your product, VC-backed competitors can release open source code which extends your AGPL product in ways which compete with your paid SaaS. (The VC funding allows them to do things like this that don’t provide them revenue, and isn’t even part of their core product, but nonetheless takes market share away from bootstrapped competitors.)

* Or if your monetization strategy is open-core, then same as previous bullet, they can build FOSS solutions which reimplement your paid features just to take market share away from you.

* If your AGPL product contains novel techniques or innovations, VC backed competitors can copy those concepts without directly using your code. Free R&D for them.

* If your AGPL product involves a paradigm shift for how to approach a problem, you have to do a ton of outreach and education on how to use your software. Later on, newer VC-backed competitors can just piggyback on all that effort you already did. And then if you have any public customer testimonials, their marketers will directly target those customers.

These aren’t hypothetical situations by the way, this stuff actually happens. It isn’t just big cloud vendors doing it either. And no FOSS license protects you from it.

Some non-OSI "source available" licenses do provide protection from the first two bullets, by way of prohibiting competitive uses, but that doesn't help with the latter two bullets.