We're human. We are inundated with technology and accounts day in and day out, and most people will choose a password that they can easily remember.
—Jonathan LeBlanc, formerly of PayPal[1]
Having to remember passwords for web applications, email, banking, and more begat the password manager. And that begat such popular and proprietary services like LastPass and 1Password.
A little over two years ago, software developer Kyle Spearrin decided the open source world needed its own web-based password manager. His company, 8Bit Solutions, develops and markets an open source alternative to services like LastPass and 1Password called Bitwarden[2].
Recently I had the opportunity to ask Spearrin some questions about Bitwarden's origins, how it secures user information, where he sees Bitwarden going, and more.
Scott Nesbitt: Why did you develop Bitwarden?
Kyle Spearrin: I've used password management tools for years. I became frustrated by the complexity and barrier to entry many of the existing solutions offered. There was also a lack of quality, open source solutions available. I thought things could be done better and that there was great value in doing so.
SN: What advantages does Bitwarden have over, say, LastPass or 1Password?
KS: The main advantage we have over many of our top competitors is that we're focused on making our entire product line open source. Being open source offers numerous advantages such as helping us gain the trust of new users (something important and hard to do in the password management space), helping keep the quality of our code in check, and allowing us to offer important features like self-hosted Bitwarden, just to name a few.
Earlier this year, we saw a user rewrite a new core backend for Bitwarden in