Hi @John3 and welcome to the community.
Many of us who use Bitwarden are lovers of open-source and security. Bitwarden tends to have a good company culture of the same which makes me gravitate towards it.
Understandably still Bitwarden is a business and needs to keep the lights on to continue to bring us continued progress.
“Devs need computers and coffee to code”
But in all seriousness it becomes a balancing act of sustaining a viable business model while providing free and open-source software and feature sets. This is by no means impossible though, RHEL is a great example, as it is a completely free and open source OS that is widely used. Yet Red Hat remains a sustainable business model by simply providing support, to the tune of a $34 Billion (that’s billion with a “B” ) acquisition by IBM.
As I understand Bitwarden has both a standard AGPL and source available license. The standard free and open-source AGPL license that most are familiar with should allow for the use of most features. However the “source available” license does have a few restrictions. The code is open and the “source available” but for limited circumstances such as testing, and development. Those features covered by the source available licensing are still required to be used with valid licensing of those features in a production environment.
You can see more here.
I am not super familiar with BitBetter, though I have come across it in the past. Given that BitBetter modifies the core of Bitwarden services, if this provides for these features and you are using this in a production environment it may violate the Bitwarden licensing terms for some of these enterprise features.
Another thing to be wary of, any software that modifies such low level core files for Bitwarden could possibly be any number of unknown changes unbeknownst to you. I always highly recommend going through and understanding the code and software running on your systems, and carefully vet any software before being installed.
Bitwarden’s main business model though is always those companies and businesses that can afford (albeit in still a fairly generous and competitive pricing structure) the higher monthly cost for business licenses for their users. Maintaining the IP on the features developed specifically for these larger enterprise customers helps to sustain Bitwarden and allow them to continue to provide for new and additional features for the regular average user and families at a low cost, and even a very generous fully-featured tier completely FREE for even the most basic of password management so that all users can better their password hygiene and digital security with little barriers.