Hi,
I am a student from India and I will be pursuing engineering as a career. I am a productivity nerd and a big non-fiction reader. I was really looking for a great, future proof second brain software. I stumbled upon obsidian and fell in love with the simplicity and the overall experience of obsidian(shifted from notion->obsidian). I am just a little bit skeptical about the future of obsidian after coming to know that Obsidian in owned by a non-profit organization.
Please clear my doubt that should I rely on obsidian completely or not??
(Pers. I really wanna use obsidian forever and will try my best to make this anyway possible by donating or working as programmer after completing my undergrad school for free).
Every software comes to an end one day.
Every plugin youāll use in Obsidian will die at a point.
However, Obsidan.md is not closed by nature : it records your datas under plain text files. Presentation may change, but youāll be still able to open your .md files in years after Obsidan.md had died.
Donāt rely too much on plugins, find a workflow that feats you in Obsidian and donāt worry too much : .md files are plain text. Make regular back up of them, and youāll be fine.
I had similar concerns before when i wanted to migrate from notion to obsidian. but local first using markdown is what sells to me the most. iāve used joplin before, which employs markdown for local storage but stores it in the appās database (not unlike notion btw).
good thing abt obsidian (and by extension, zettlr, logseq and perhaps even vscode) is that they have desktop app that donāt rely internet. you can always have an āoldā version of this app should they die. notion, evernote and remnote do have desktop app but rely on calling back to their server (even server down would render it useles).
on that note, markdown based PKM (using tools i mentioned above - zettlr, logseq, and vscode with some extension) can be quite easily used together (in fact iāve used obsidian with vscode quite alot). u dont rely on obsidian completely, but if use markdown based, thereās always a fallback (but you would have to change your workflow a bit).
Because of the nature of the markdown and other aspects used in the design of Obsidian, Iām not concerned about the future of the PKM. Case in point, the software thebrain has been around for 24 years. I believe there is a built in mantra with the common PKMās about future proofing. A little googling revealed this nugget about linking your thinking - I had no idea ā¦
Linking Your Thinking | Computerworld News & Features Story
By RUSSELL KAY
(January 31, 2000)
About two years ago, I was introduced to a fascinating and, frankly, offbeat piece of software called The Brain, from The Brain LLC (formerly Natrificial Software Technologies Inc.) in Santa Monica, Calif. I used the product for a while and then stopped. Recently, I caught up with the product again, and itās just as intriguing now as it was then.
You may have noticed that I havenāt yet said what The Brain is or what it does. Thatās because there isnāt any convenient label I can tack on to it.
The Brain (currently at Version 1.73) is a tool for managing information by visually organizing resources on the computer or Internet according to whatever scheme makes sense to you, completely independent of the file system.
The terminology is a little strange. The Brain uses a 3-D network to link what it calls āthoughtsā ā graphic objects that can be anything from a label or Web address to a directory or document, or even a server or outside network. These thoughts are displayed on a field called the Plex.