This logic can be used to support open sourcing the project.
It seems you are concerned that (for example) a GPL license won’t be respected, a big tech company will steal the code and even though you could win if you went to court, it would bleed your resources dry…
This is absolutely a valid consideration!
But if you are concerned that a Big Tech company will not respect a GPL license (given the same scenario you outlined), what makes you think they will respect the current proprietary license you have stamped on your project?
It will require the same amount of legal fees to fight and protect a GPL license as it would a proprietary license.
So if you’re fucked either way, why not just go for the open source version because it comes with benefits that proprietary licenses do not have?
I would love for Obsidian to go open source, however I understand the developers reasons for not doing at this time.
I believe a good first step would be for Obsidian to document and open source any divinations (we will call them obsidianisms from here on out) they are using/making of the markdown spec. This would help make it a documented superset spec for markdown. Then having a namespaced (spec → author|org → plug-in name) way that plug-in authors could document the changes/additions that the plugins do to the spec.
Having an open source officially defined (and versioned) spec for any obsidianism’s that differ from the official markdown spec, would allow authors who make conversion tools (pandoc, etc) to reference that clear spec in order to create plug-in’s for the tools to handle a clean conversion between formats.
for everybody that wants an open source obsidian, check out logseq:
I just started migrating. Its still in beta and early, but looks really promising and the community grows well. i love it so far. my guess is that because of them being os and having all the benefits that come with it, that they will surpass obsidian in the near future in popularity (fast dev cycles, pull requests, …)
Not trying to speak against what you said. Just wanting to comment on some interesting analogy that you used.
Even if locking my front door is not fully secure, at least it turns the attackers to my neighbor’s unlocked door. Even if close-source can still be abused, at least it turns the attackers (or at least lazy attackers) to easier targets.
Of course they can sue those who violate their license. But they did mention that they don’t have the time for those things. Developing awesome software for us is already something. So just go for the convenient path.
And I fully agree with you. How many will actually go through open-sourced code? Also, false sense of security. Just because it is open-sourced, we think that it is secure.
I respect whatever decisions take the developers. I’d only ask them for allowing some confidence people to dispose the code just in case something happens to them (hope not! )
Is adding the pledge to open up code access if Obsidian discontinues still under consideration? It would be awesome to have something more official written somewhere in the terms of service.
I understand the idea of getting the source of what could be considered as a critical software in our workflow, but this is not to the users to require it and given the notes are in an open format this is the only insurance to keep our notes. Also open sourcing would require people to maintain it.
There’s another aspect to open-sourcing: allowing the use of Obsidian within corporations with strict policies on what software gets whitelisted.
Being open source allows software to be subjected to a security audit. This was the case when I worked at Google - employees could request certain software to be evaluated for use within that intranet. Being closed-sourced was often a show stopper.
closed-source products are also audited, I worked on proprietary products audited by governmental agencies and big companies, this is often the case in the enterprise realm.
This idea would go a good distance toward alleviating concerns about longevity.
I noticed recently that the Vivaldi web browser (based on open source Chromium and other FOSS projects) does something that might be useful for Obsidan to consider. Vivaldi uses and contributes to those projects (so they publish those additions) but they also have a layer of work (their interface and special features), which are not licensed as open source. From what I understood, they still publish that code for anyone to see, they just do not enable people to reuse/redistribute it under an open source licence. So I suppose people might learn from, might possibly suggest bug fixes or whatnot, but couldn’t fork it.
It strikes me that if Obsidian did that in combination with a pledge to open source upon discontinuation, it might address many (though not all) of the concerns that people requesting open source code would hope for. Obsidian could keep it’s existing business model based on a proprietary licence as is but allay many of the worries that people currently have.
I’m not necessarily suggesting this is the best idea but if it hasn’t been considered, might be worth thinking about.
Another person here who would pay monthly for Obsidian if it were FOSS. I was disappointed to find out that Obsidian isn’t FOSS and that the developers have such an uninformed view on the matter.
Thanks to all the people listing alternatives in this thread! I’ll be checking those out.
Want to say it’s really good application and I really appreciate the work developers doing.
But I’m really don’t get a point, why they’re strongly trying to avoid opening their project? I saw dev’s reply in 2020, but it doesn’t make much sense, in my opinion.
We live in the complicated world, and I can’t and won’t blindly trust anyone with closed source code. If someone’s interested read articles and opinions from Richard Stallman, founder of GNU, GPL licenses etc. And if you want so, you can dig dipper after that. Because it’s all about freedom to choose, contribute and inspect, because I want to know in 100% what product am I using exactly.
Don’t get me wrong, this app looks and feels smoothly, with community plugins it already became a really huge player on the scene. But everyone who reads this, always do your own research whatever you want to do and use.
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