There are healthy FOSS models where developers erect a company and earn a living from it, right?

When you sell your product you are entangled with your "clients".

I gave an example of Standard Notes. They open sourced their client/server yet they are selling subscriptions via their servers. They also limit, like Bitwarden, the "free" subscription. So they provide freemium accounts + paid for.

Because many started to use their software and self host + provide free (completely free not freemium) access to the public, Standard Notes made it much more difficult to self host and I had the "opportunity" to talk to them about this since we were also self hosting. And indeed they admitted the decisions were mostly for their financial gains since so many were providing Standard Notes for free, and that takes away from their profits.

That's the catch here and I am not accusing these people really. The developers need financial support indeed. But please do understand that when they sell their product, even if it is FOSS, their decisions will be biased. They are under pressure.

So eventually we did not host Standard Notes anymore since it became more and more difficult to do so.

I hope you see my point.

I am reading through the article.

You are saying:

Having a fully featured free version is key to enabling the Bitwarden vision of a hack-free world.

But the "free" plan only has "Bitwarden Send for direct encrypted sharing" for Text and not for files; the "Two-step Login" feature is missing options such as "YubiKey, FIDO2, Duo"; missing "Encrypted File Attachments", missing "Bitwarden Authenticator (TOTP)". So the free version is for sure not "fully featured". Am I correct to say that?

Bitwarden as a company continues to grow sustainably and quickly by serving users who can afford to pay, in particular businesses with Teams and Enterprise plans.

You see after writing several books about corruption, looking at the software world too, and broken promises. After a decade of seeing endless examples of companies promising this or that, I find it so hard to believe any words coming from a company. Here's the basic why:

If I sell tomatoes, I can never afford to tell people to go to the other shop because they have better and cheaper tomatoes. I will lose customers...

In other words, you are selling Bitwarden subscriptions. You need to keep on doing that by all means, else (unfortunately) you can go bankrupt. This is an entanglement I personally cannot ignore nor should anyone else do. I have used a similar service in terms of the marketing approach: Standard Notes. They also have a strong "manifesto". And yet they started to make it harder for others to self host because they were losing money from self-hosters providing free Standard Notes services for the public.

If you made it more and more easy to self-host Bitwarden and more and more would self host and provide free (not freemium) access to the public, you are in danger of going bankrupt. And this truly sucks and I can never use words like "grow sustainably".

I truly hope you understand my points here.

No, you are twisting my sentence. The wording was "free open source", that's different than saying something is free.

Sorry not intentionally. So "free and open source" can be paid for, and "free" can be money free. And vice versa. May not be confusing for you, but for me it is very much so, and for pretty much everyone who does not strongly grasp what FOSS is.

You seem to say that as soon as the word "free" is in the text, you are only allowed to link to the GH repo.

If I tell people that Nextcloud is a free Google Drive alternative I'll make sure not to link to their Enterprise Business Plan. It is a nice way of keeping yourself honest and not confuse anyone. I would not direct people to MegaSync and say "Megasync is a free open source file hosting for computers and mobile devices.". Their client is Open Source and even if their server would also be, it is misleading.

What if repo README only held dev compile instruction, and the site offered full documents, transparency on offerings, accessible, easy-to-navigate.

Simple, link to the page where they provide that "free open source" part of their project. Regardless if it is on their website or github.

All I am doing is making people aware that when you sell something, you are extremely prone to bias, corruption, deceiving others, and so on. I have showcased in this book a plethora of examples tromsite.com/books/#flipbook-d… - and overall in our books here tromsite.com/books.

Let's take Matrix/Element for example. Matrix is the server, Element is the client (chat). matrix.org/ is the main server website. They separate the two quite a bit. I cannot see prices on the matrix website for instance. On the same website they encourage the use of any other client not just Element - matrix.org/docs/projects/try-m… . Which tells me that they are more honest and less biased towards their own client.

On the Element website however (the client) element.io they provide paid for services as in "hosting and setup - services", but as far as I can tell they do not touch the software. No "minus features". This means they do not use the software as the product, but services. Much much better. Less entanglement. Actually even if you use their default app app.element.io/#/login they make it easy for you to add your own matrix server and login with that. I do not see this as an option for Bitwarden vault.bitwarden.com/#/login

Overall Matrix + Element provide open source software (server/client) and sell some services without removing features from the software itself. Thus they are prone to less bias I would argue. Maybe that's why they let you use their Client with any Server, directly from their own website. And perhaps they can do all of this because they get enough funds from all sort of sources, so they don't have to sell that much.

their "free" plan is truly free

It is not free, it is limited in features specifically as a marketing strategy called freemium.

Freemium, a portmanteau of the words "free" and "premium," is a pricing strategy by which a basic product or service is provided free of charge, but money (a premium) is charged for additional features, services, or virtual (online) or physical (offline) goods that expand the functionality of the free version of the software.[1][2] This business model has been used in the software industry since the 1980s.

You might be fooled by the wording there, but that's actually the point of this strategy. Works with some people.

all of their code is publicly available and can be self hosted

Yes this is great, and it is different form the services that they provide. For those, they charge.

If you start with bitwarden on this, you'll have to move to every other FOSS project who offer paid services, especially Redhat.

And that's what I've been doing for years. We have a custom Linux distro for example and hundreds of apps in our library, and we check to see if they are truly free (trade-free) or not tromjaro.com/apps/ - we have a Trade-Free directly too where we vet these goods/services for how "free" they are.

But I think if you are honest your persistence on this thread mostly stems from your advocacy of the concept of "trade-free" versus other uses of "free" that do not match it. As an activist spreading the msg.

My engagement and "passion" on this thread comes from years and years of seeing so many companies promising this or that, and then they are caught up in lies and deceiving tactics. And I've see them abusing the concept of free and privacy too many times. I do not want that to happen. So I react to that.

Bitwarden may be a bit of a nitpicking case, but I started by suggesting to @FediFollows that the way they wrote the post is confusing, to me and am sure to others. And to understand the misconceptions and abuse of the concept of "free" that I think Bitwarden is at least a little bit guilty of.

I am someone who tests thousands of Open Source apps for our TROMjaro distro, and I am tired of seeing so many "marketing" strategies hidden in a sneaky way, behind many apps. At times you don't realize that you are using a freemium version of an app up until later on, and it is truly bothering. Once I have edited this big book in a PDF editor that was "free and open source" and I had installed it via the software manager, and when I wanted to save the PDF it injected a watermark on all pages asking me to pay to have that removed. I've seen this happen countless of times.

In any case, I appreciate this comment:

Look, I really appreciate the passion and perseverance with which you advocate different, better ways to move forward.

Being extremely passionate about something is a double edge sword, on one hand you will be very vocal and active and this is very important, on the other hand you can be biased. I try not to be biased, and if I am I hope others will expose that.