What country do you live in and how much should you be punished for living in it?

Github is basically social media but for tech nerds. Social media networks naturally monopolize, as they primarily have value because everyone else is already there. If you put your project on Github and it is popular you might get 2k “stars” and regular pull requests. If you put your project on an alternative you might get 10X less of both. So people make decisions about the trade-offs between exposure and avoiding Microsoft

The US has been punishing open source contributors from countries they don’t like.

For academia I recommend having an IT cost center responsible for the hosting infrastructure, namely virtualization. Then let people have VPSes (or similar) as needed to run docker-based services. This makes it easier to handle network and security concerns. Most large universities already offer something like this to students and faculty.

Why do you want to host them? Usually the difficult parts are necessary because they’re needed to have the level of control, security, and privacy that is the reason a person is self-hosting in the first place. And there are not enough simple standards for running software securely so you do need to learn some nerd stuff to do it right - but no so much that it is impossible for a beginner.

Ah. I don’t have a list but I know that lemmy.world does its very best to emulate the worst parts of Reddit, including this.

What do you mean by censored?

On no you can’t say slurs. Truly the most oppressed.

lmao there are already very good “which programming language is this?” guessers but ratger than just use one they throw it at an incompetent black box.

I think it is unlikely that they are simply bad at PR and not trying to do damage control for something they would like to push anyways eventually. Why are they creating a proprietary element in the first place? Is the selling point of their product not that it is open source? They are making some changes.

…or they made an honest mistake and don’t care to put it back on F-droid for reasons to which we are not privy.

An honest mistake of hosting their entire own repo and writing up documents for it? It isn’t just off F-Droid, they are doing their own thing.

I bring up these counter-examples not as a way to point out where I’m right and you’re wrong, but to point out that there are other candidate explanations, and it’s not justified to infer that malfeasance is the only likely possibility.

Yes you are suggesting that people give them the benefit of the doubt. And I am saying that would be unreasonable given the facts.

I also understand why you would cynically think that Bitwarden might succumb to Capitalism—I too live in a late-stage-capitalism country—but that’s not a forgone conclusion, and I say again that we don’t need to be imagining villains when there’s plenty of objectively real ones at which to point a finger alreadIy

Bitwarden has already succumbed to capitalism, it is a product by and for a for-profit company. It is, with few exceptions, just a question of when they will have a profitability crisis and need to find avenues by which to increase revenues or decrease costs. Sometimes that takes 15-20 years, sometimes it takes 3.

I have not followed their finances but I would be curious to know what they are doing at the moment. Could be seeking to get bought out, could be looking for new funding, could be working around the needs of a major client, could be something else.

As always, when a project is backed by a company we should approach it tentatively because while they will provide support for it for some time they will eventually be tempted to do something shady to increase profit. Or to just be profitable at all, which investors always want ASAP when interest rates are high. And then we will need to fork it and see if it is feasible without VC backing. To my knowledge the only other viable path for an open source company is to become an industry standard where the major monopolies decide to not fight about it and instead say, “it is fine as it is and won’t be profitable but it is a useful thing to share costs on”. Docker, Inc. is somewhere along that path, scraping together products at the periphery of the software while the industry monopolies more or less share the core project in its various compatible forms. And Docker similarly tried to ham-fistedly seek profit sources like when it tried a silly fee scheme for Dockerhub and created a small exodus that the monopolies ate up (e.g. GitHub).

Of course you inherently cannot trust a private company to keep their product open, including open core models. In that situation everyone using or contributing should be making a gamble: that if they go too far the project will be forked, the company will cut its community in two, and the fotk will go on to be decently successful as a community project.

Their inability to do the right PR things is just a signal that they can’t be bothered with the facade that is useful for them to maintain community support and FOSS nerd marketing for their product.

Re: ethics, they are no longer on F-Droid because they tried to get this in under the radar and include non-free code in builds. Instead of fixing that problem they made their own repo.

Bitwarden will likely eventually destroy their FOSS model for profit-seeking, it is just a matter of when. This is how these things work.

Our feudal patrons are so stingy!

Not trusting a company that has been quietly undermining open source builds of their android client and being cagey + using guarded and laconic PR speak on this is not fallacious thinking, it is just recognizing behaviors and knowing why a company would be doing that. These companies hire people to craft responses and otherwise manage their “community”, and providing no assurances of permanently open clients when they tried to pull this is an intentional omission.

Yes because it is about, ultimately, making the major clients incompatible with vaultwarden on both a legal and technical level.

A likely outcome if they don’t reverse course is a split where FOSS Nerfs fork the clients and have to maintain their own versions. That’s the outcome Bitwarden wants. This reeks of a bazinga, “how dare they benefit from our work and take our users”, which is hilarious for a FOSS ecosystem that almost universally benefits corporations with free labor.

They’re trying to argue legal technicalities because acknowledging that they’re trying to reduce compatibility with servers like vaultwarden would be bad PR.

Per their new license, anyone that uses their SDK to build a client cannot say, “this is for Bitwarden and compatible servers like vaultwarden”. They cannot support those other servers, per their license. Anyone that gets suckered into using their SDK now becomes a force against alternative implementations.

They will lose their most expensive employees who have the most economic security such that they can quit or find other jobs.

Under capitalism, proletarian wage labor is a commodity, this makes its cost minimizable. Tech workers have been spared some of this due to petty bourgeous aspects of their economic relations, part of which was just that they were in short supply and could demand upwardly mobile career paths plus the fact that your direct work really just requires a laptop. Amazon would like its employees to be proletarianized, to be more precarious, to be replaceable, so that they can pay them less and have greater capacity to discipline them. This is also why there was and is a large push for “STEM” education by the FAANGs. Their “labor shortage” arguments are really just a reframing of “we wish we could pay you less and treat you worse by increasing the size of your labor pool”.

It is constructive dismissal. Really it is a layoff but they want to get people to quit first because that is better for the company. But the American legalized labor system is very employer-friendly when it comes to enforcement. Often an employer can just lie, even when documentation contradicts them, and a judge or other official will simply side with the employer’s narrative.

At the end of the day, labor power is always about material leverage. Don’t believe the companies or the caoitakist government system that say it is based on the rules they state.

An incredible crime.

Companies don’t care about you and will literally kill you rather than lose out on control or profits. Always prioritize yourself over a company. And over a job. Easier said than done, but do the best you can.

In a more just world the remaining workers would already have a posse.

Factory owners should at minimum be afraid of the workers.

If you own the copyright then yes this is 100% legal.

There are already apps that are like this. They usually add a couple features to the paid release so that people feel like they are getting something extra for the money. The good ones will eventually move those features to the open release eventually. However, this incentivizes keeping part of the app closed source so that nobody can just rename and re-release the paid version.

It is 100% up to you for how to handle these tradeoffs. Personally, I think so long as you are principled and ready for some criticism - and can handle it gracefully - getting paid for work that builds your open source app is a very good idea. We don’t all have the luxury of maintaining high quality unpaid side projects!