Technology

Thanks for the rare, rational comment regarding Obsidian. Many people here seem to think releasing software as closed source automatically means you have something to hide; seemingly forgetting we live in a capitalist system in which you must constantly sell your services to survive. (I am saying this as someone who adores FOSS and donates to most of my homelab software on a regular basis).

I think a more productive way to look at is: is the closed source dev friendly (or at least non-hostile) to the open source community? In the case of Obsidian, they haven't done anything egregious, and regularly contribute to open source plugins. Furthermore, the notes are stored as markdown files. This gives the user strong resistance against potential enshittification, so even if they did go rogue you can just move to some other text editor lol. Granted, you would miss out on plugins but otherwise that's a good reason to keep your plugin usage light and plan your Obsidian vault accordingly.

it's ok for people to profit off of their IP

Absolutely. I just have trust issues with closed source software and platforms. Burned too many times.

If they open source all their code, some tech wizard will implement a self hosted obsidian sync server with the same convenience as theirs in a day, and the company will lose their revenue stream

Obsidian is storing everything as plaintext files. Those convenient selfhosted sync solutions have been out there for years.

I think it’s ok for people to profit off of their IP

I absolutely agree. That doesn't mean the software has to be closed source though, a lot of software works well when sold with paid support, especially to companies.

If the price is low enough, companies will often just pay even if they don't need the support.

It says it's free, but then there's a pricing and plans page?

A lot of alarm bells ringing for me about that app.

Thanks for sharing I didn't know about this one and it's robust as keep

It stores your data in plaintext, and simply uses the program to parse special formatting characters. There are no attempts at obfuscation or encryption, and it doesn’t lock you into a walled garden that refuses to play nice with other programs. The program itself is closed-source, but anyone could write an open source version to parse the same info… There just hasn’t been a good reason to do so. Even if Obsidian as a company and program ceases to exist overnight, your data is still safe on your machine and can be read by anyone who cares enough to dig into the file. Hell, you can even open it as the plaintext file and dig through it manually.

I just cant wrap my head around why they're willing to go so far to gain good will from people by having such a generous free tier, but somehow licensing the code under a FOSS license is out of the question??

Why not just go all the way and make sure everyone who cares about reading the souce could also give you free contributions?

I think the big difference is that you can use it for free without any account needed, and all your data is stored locally in a format that remains accessible to alternative apps.

So the moment they start doing questionable stuff you are not a hostage to their app. There are alternatives, they are just not as nice as this currently.

Obsidian stores the notes in a well known plaintext format on your computer. They can't easily hold you hostage like with other closed source apps.

Nothing else is changing. No account required, no ads, no tracking, no strings attached. Your data remains fully in your control, stored locally in plain text Markdown files. All features are available to you for free without limits.

Seems they'll just keep making money on sync.

Note-taking app. Each note is a markdown file, so you can add formatting.

It's like trillium, but not open source Here is an enthusiastic person talking about the state of the art of one year ago for 20 minute. https://youtu.be/XRpHIa-2XCE

I use it to track everything..

Quick notes knowledgebase Follow up (personal and work)

The great thing about Obsidian is how flexible it is. The bad thing about Obsidian is how flexible it is.. 😀

I have seen may people comment, or outright leave, Obsidian because because there was too much to learn.. or too many plugins to explore..

Personally, I only look for plugins if I need something specific. Don't see the point of trying random plugins. Is like spending time finding solutions to a problem you may not have..

Also, I work on tech and many documents are in markdown. Obsidian makes it easier to read those. Specially the collapse / expand functionality is really great for exploring large docs.. as long as the creators properly used sections (basically # for level 1, ## for level 2..and so on)

I use Obsidian as a tool to help my shitty memory.

I want to have one single place where I can go search for a thing I know I saw somewhere but can't remember where or what it was exactly

"Did I watch movie X" -> Obsidian -> Watchlist -> Movies and there it'll be.

Same for tv-series, anime, books, games. Yes there are services that do it like Trakt, Imdb, Letterboxd, TVMaze and god knows how many for games. They all get enshittified eventually requiring you to pay for basic functionality (looking at you trakt...)

I'm building a tool for getting my data out from all those services into Obsidian markdown format, maybe It'll get finished some day :D (IMDB and Goodreads work, but you need to do a manual csv export)

"How did I install that finicky piece of software last time" -> Obsidian, I wrote something down because I knew I couldn't remember it. Then I'll improve the guide + refresh with new data.

Now I have a pretty good step-by step guide on how to set up a computer, no matter the OS, just how I like it - all in Obsidian. Mostly just commands I copy-paste and some manual steps that I can't be arsed to automate.

Same with my daily notes, I just write down what I did maybe with some tags so I can find them when I start wondering when did I visit X or put up the curtains in the bedroom.

I just paid for the sync 🤷🏻‍♂️

It’s $4 a month, I drink one beer less a month and I actually save 3€ 😀

It's a very, very different approach having everything as a bullet point though.

I like obsidian specifically because you don't need to rely on some built-in sync tool. The files are right there and in a sane format, you can sync them however you want. I use syncthing for this at home, but the choice is yours

It's regrettable that Obsidian isn't open source. But the nice thing about it is that its data store is just a bunch of markdown files in a folder structure, and very easily migrated to any other application. They may have the code but they don't take the data hostage like a lot of commercial software does.