I mean, fair take, but sometimes more thoughtful and forward-looking companies aren't looking for fast return on investment.

It could be argued similarly for Valve that all their investment in Linux ecosystems and open source in general when Linux desktops account for just over 3% of all desktop installations while Windows sits comfortably at 70% of the desktop market, just isn't a lucrative investment.

While in the long-term it frees Valve from the restrictions of the Microsoft environment and from the risk that Microsoft would make it more and more difficult for Steam to integrate as they try to make their own game store and Game Pass the premiere gaming experience on Windows, those are future risks that are speculation, even though they are rational speculation.

Investing so deeply in open source isn't a lucrative thing for Valve to be doing, but they're looking at long-term goals.

In other words, I could see the goal here being something like protecting the Bitwarden brand and making sure more people are using their official client than unofficial with the goal of making it easy to use and enticing people into the general Bitwarden ecosystem long-term. Ten years from now, people who have been running Bitwarden Lite might have a lot more options for integration and paid services than people simply using Vaultwarden.

Is that lucrative? No, but it's still pursuing brand-name dominance and keeping people officially within their ecosystem as a way to grow userbase and give users more features (including paid ones) that may not be immediately available or easily integrated with Vaultwarden.

It's probably not but if all the system admins are using vault warden at home then they may consider using vaultwarden at work and that would cost bitwarden money.

It’s a pretty normal model. You offer a free version to help make your product popular. People will use it at home and then at work they will gravitate to the thing they are familiar with. Small companies will start on the free version and eventually upgrade.

I think it's nice they offer their own lite version.

Just because there is a more popular OSS solution doesn't mean they should be complacent and accept people will use Vaultwarden.

This shows they support their users directly instead of just letting their users fend for themselves.

They also could indirectly be blamed by some people using vaultwarden should an issue arise with it.

By publishing the first party lite version they can say "well you're not using our supported version". While still being friendly to self-hosters.

They've been offering self hosted options for years and this is just another method that isn't much more work to put out. I dont think they care about vault warden that much. I've been using the full self hosted stack since 2019 at home.

VaultWarden has contributors working on paid BitWarden features. For instance I've been following the LDAP PR for a while now. If they pull users away, they may have users who are unaware when those features release.

That being said, I won't complain when for-profit companies based on FOSS support self-hosters. It's good for the industry.

Edit:

This is why I won't switch to it, though:

My homelab only has one home to phone, and it's not someone else's home.