Hi! Loving Obsidian so far, seriously great job.
I’ve read some of the HackerNews comments and heard some of the basics about why not to open source Obsidian right now; I understand and don’t want to be a nag, but I did want to just add this into the official feature request forum here for ease of reference in the future.
My thoughts as to why this needs to happen:
- Currently, while it’s stated that the app only transmits the ‘software version’ info back to the server, there is no way to confirm that this is the case (as far as I can see)
- Considering that people may well use Obsidian to store private, sensitive material, the lack of a privacy policy / lack of open source code makes it iffy to use the app for anything of that nature
- Extensibility / dev friendliness will open up immensely when others are able to help squash bugs / improve features / add plugins with ease.
As stated on HN, I think it’s an absolutely viable strategy for Obsidian following in the footsteps of other projects like Standard Notes with a free open source base; but paid plans for syncing, publishing, etc.
I think open-sourcing the core of the product would open up a lot of help with development tasks, and can help get the privacy / self-hosted HN sort of crowd to fully support Obsidian as well.
I love the app so far, I really do; but privacy is a major issue in the world today and a closed-source app with the potential access to my day-to-day journals, notes, and tasks is not ideal for lots of potential users of the app, in my opinion.
Thanks again!