Use case or problem
The idea is to improve community trust in Obsidian’s security and privacy model.
Proposed solution
Currently, some of Obsidian’s feature set is available as ‘core plugins’. These are not source-available or open source.
Following the discussion in Open Sourcing of Obsidian and the concerns some (albeit small) group of people are raising regarding the closed-source nature of Obsidian in regards of private and confidential data, I suggest rendering the networking and sync components of Obsidian into a separate ‘core plugin’ which would then be made source-available. The complete networking and synchronisation capacity of Obsidian will be contained in this core plugin, and nowhere else.
The idea is to be able to alleviate fears regarding data security and privacy, while keeping most of Obsidian closed-source. The networking & sync capacities have no much use for anyone that would attempt to steal the code, and they would be released under a source-available license that doesn’t permit code theft.
Yes, I know that no one can be sure that all the networking and sync code was contained within this plugin. But since we are consistently being reminded by people that we need to trust the developers, they would do this in a bona fide manner to increase community trust for security- and privacy-minded users. I think this is a fair trade.
A bonus would be that if you turn off this plugin from within Obsidian, and Obisidian still requests Internet access, it would be a sign that this was not done well or at all. Again, I am aware that this can be circumvented, but if we trust the developers, they won’t circumvent it.
That would be the gist of my feature request. Feel free to discuss.