I created an account just for this. Seeing how the developers likely won’t change their minds, I’ll be moving away from Obsidian to logseq and similar open-source projects. Obsidian is extremely feature-rich, and fits my use case perfectly, but using it as a second brain (which means writing extremely private notes, journals and thoughts) would be ridiculous, since its closed-source nature means the only guarantee that my notes are truly private is the dev’s words. “We keep your data private and secure” is also what Microsoft, Google, Apple and Facebook claim; the only difference is that those companies have already been proven to collect user data, while in Obsidian’s case, there is absolutely no way to know one way or the other, besides blind trust.
There are people who want open-source for reasons such as better documentation, or community development. This, however, goes against the interests of the developers.
I want to paint a picture where Obsidian goes open-source with the objective of providing transparency, so that the project can be rightfully trusted by privacy-minded users. This approach would be in the devs’ best interests, and their reluctance to go this route means they’re either collecting data, or misunderstand the situation. I don’t mean to imply they’re maliciously selling data, nor insult their intelligence; that said, the points below show that making the code public would be a net positive, and thinking otherwise would not be logical.
- Having the code open-sourced for the sake of letting people know it’s not collecting user data doesn’t imply taking bug reports, pull requests, or interacting with outside devs. The Obsidian developers would keep their workflow and Obsidian would be under their control; nothing would change.
- Their business model would not be affected at all, since the revenue comes not a paid app, but paywalled additional features, namely syncing. That’s not affected by open-sourcing the project.
- Their number of users would increase (more like skyrocket, but I’m sticking to objective language), since more and more people are becoming concerned about privacy and valuing open-source projects. There’s already a huge potential customer base that would switch to Obsidian in a heartbeat if they could verify its trustfulness, add to that the snowballing effect of those users, plus the fact that more and more people will otherwise leave the project as people get better informed about privacy. Add to this, even if Obsidian doesn’t interact with the open-source community in terms of pull requests and such, going open-source will cause it to get recommended by said community, since it’s a superior app, now usable by FOSS users.
- I am not knowledgeable enough about software licensing to justify talking about it, but I do want to echo what other people said: propietary licenses offer absolutely no benefit when compared to non-propietary ones, regarding illegal copying of code.
- I don’t know if there’s an open-source license that does not permit copying source code; in that case, it would offer good protection against snippet copying and forking. Not complete protection, not without lawyers, but enough of a legal threat to turn people off from doing it, to the point where the concern of people grabbing features from Obsidian would be actually much smaller than originally depicted. If such an OSS license exists that is.
- Grabbing features from a completely different project is not an easy copy-paste, and in some cases, may actually take more work to adapt into one’s own program. In the end, this concern is valid, but less significant that it would appear at first.
- Forking is also a valid concern, but Obsidian is not just its source code; there’s not only Obsidian Sync, but also the developer support, community, and popularity. Unless the company made a suicide move, it would not be replaced by a fork. As another user said, if users want Obsidian, they will choose Obsidian.
This approach of just releasing the code to be publicly audited, and ignoring the other aspects of open-sourcing such as accepting pull requests, has only the downside of letting people fork and use bits of Obsidian (which is not as big a problem as it would initially seem, read above), while, on the upside, gaining enormous support from the open-source community, in the form of publicity, a giant influx of new users, and many paid subscriptions.
If the Obsidian team fails to do this, eventually the project will fall behind, since other applications are already starting to compete in terms of features, while also reaping all the benefits of being open-source, not community development, but something key that Obsidian is lacking: transparency and a proper way to earn its privacy-concerned users’ rightful trust.
I will check back every now and then to see if this ever goes open-source, although many users are going to be lost to open-source alternatives, and those users may or may not come back even if this gets opened. I love Obsidian, and the sooner it becomes usable, the sooner people come back to it, the sooner it stops losing users, the sooner it will truly be able to thrive as a business for personal note-taking. I don’t believe; I know this is the best for both the devs and us users, It’s just a matter of how soon the team can realize this.