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this post was submitted on 15 May 2026
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FOSS is a standardized term. As the Free Software Foundation defines it:
You are not granted right to modify or distribute Bitwarden. You can inspect and use that to build your own. That is what Vaultwarden does.
Well, the client code is liensed GPL 3.0 and server code is licensed AGPL 3.0, and those are both FOSS licenses. There are some additional commercial components licensed under a non-FOSS source-available license, but those are not required for the basic service. I guess you can't use the Bitwarden trademark either. I would still consider Bitwarden FOSS, although with a slightly limited (but not crippling) scope of the term "Bitwarden".
So you wanna say it's Source-Available, yes?
All I say is that it's not FOSS in the strict sense.
Neither the OSI definition, nor the FSF definition require you to allow your trademark to be used freely, nor do they require you to only host FOSS software for your FOSS software to qualify as such. The client and server software published as GPL and APL qualify as FOSS by both orgs that define the term. Vaultwarden is better for self hosting specifically because it is superior software for self hosting.