Just registered to make a point regarding this being a closed source project.
I was looking for a knowledge management program and have investigated several options, as there are plenty available.
At first, I just naturally assumed Obsidian is open source. Upon further investigation, I could not find a link to Github or any alternative. Apparently it is not open source, according to what has been said in this thread.
I will therefore dismiss this program as an option for me, mainly due to aspects like the ones @bloom already summarised.
In addition to that, there are plenty of open source options available. Why would I pick this closed source one, then?
Let me be clear: I am not against closed source. I use closed source programs all over the place.
However, this program is inherently about private & personal things and you cannot make something like this closed source. It’s just not trustworthy that way.
Now, we also have plenty of open source options available, so there’s no point in using this one.
I felt like it was important to say this, because people on this forum mostly use this software for obvious reasons, so you barely can detect people like me, who glance over this and just dismiss it right away. You don’t even know how many people you have lost, because they did not engage in this community in any way. I am just one of many, except I chose to speak up about it.
Think about how much you are losing and how it does not make sense to release a closed source app, which whole point is to note people’s private thoughts & personal situations.
I just want to chime in with my two cents, because this thread is genuinely tiring as it is, and the points made again and again tired.
Maybe I need to bold this message.
Obsidian not being open-source will not change with yet another non-invested person chiming in with their newly-created forum account.
As a theme dev who significantly prefer to offer my time and energy and work with other theme devs who have more permissive open-source licenses on their themes (like MIT or BSD or MPL over GPL), and is in the camp that open-sourcing has its benefits, I really think this is out of hand. I think a lot of the entitlement re: Obsidian being not open-source has to do with the fact that Obsidian provides a lot of what a FOSS project does, but for free. No one would have ask the same from the likes of Roam, or Notion, or Word. Perhaps some introspection here is needed.
If you think Obsidian being closed-source is a problem, then you are honestly, free to use another program. I personally think it’s really bang out of order to ask Licat, Silver, and now Liam, to destroy their own source of income (let’s face it: open-source licenses are weak and it relies on other devs not being a dick) to placate some people’s open-source fetishes which have been very evident in this thread.
Roam and Notion are not good examples because they are web based. Word is not a good example because it’s old. Practically legacy software. It came to prominence before the public understood how invasive software can get. People using that software either don’t know, or don’t care about privacy concerns. A sentiment that is more and more prominent, and in part why make this case at all.
Today privacy is a serious concern for discerning people. Evernote lost it’s dominance because they violated this publicly. The publicly part is important because companies know to obfuscate this stuff as best they can.
Obsidian’s greatest value is the local first, presumably private, fantastic interface for your local file system. Even the sync service is end to end encrypted.
So far I trust the Obsidian team. Seems good, and I want all developers to have a thriving business. I’m not a crazy privacy wonk. I just don’t wont telemetry in a writing app. I don’t want another Evernote situation. I don’t want “helpful” contextual features based on my usage, or content. I can use google products for that. That is what open source represents to me. That doesn’t seem like an entitlement. It seems like common sense.
I understand all pros (for community) and cons (for the dev team) of opening sources. As I am a software developer, I use Obsidian a lot, and actively participate in Obsidian plugins. You can check my activity on GitHub. Lately I did tons of Obsidian plugins improvements. However, there are some things that are impossible or at least very difficult to do in plugins, without actually correcting the Obsidian’s source code. I would love to have an opportunity to pitch in to Obsidian. But, the team said they have no enough resources to review pull requests. So even if the open sources and I fix some issues, the rest of the world won’t see it anyway.
If I really-really want to make a fix, I can just deobfuscate Obsidian’s source code, make my own changes and use it locally. I do this reverse-engineering sometimes if I am working with Obsidian plugin that requires some API that Obsidian didn’t publicly expose yet.
I love Obsidian a lot. I would love to even pay to the dev team to give me sources sources so I could fix some bummers that annoy me in Obsidian and then even pay for the developers’ time to review my PRs. I am ready to sign NDAs to ensure that sources won’t leak. Maybe with this model, Obsidian Developers can get an external development help from those inspired people like me that are skilled enough to actually help Obsidian to get greater
There are a handful of devs that do what you do and often contribute to the definition of the API.
I think it’s best you just join discord and and ask your questions/run your proposal in #plugin-dev https://discord.com/channels/686053708261228577/840286264964022302
Oh no don’t speculate on things you don’t know. I am moving away from Logseq to Obsidian. Obsidian is thriving and, all things considered, is having a brighter future than Logseq.
Always when developers try to hide their code using the dumbest of excuses, its opensource counterpart appears. I like obsidian, but as soon as I find anything in opensource, even bad quality, I’ll switch to it
Wow, that looks really cool. Thanks for the recommendation! It even has Russian, and runs without installing (a nice little thing). It’s disappointing that it uses Lisp for development, but that doesn’t mean that the program is bad. I’ve been using it for a couple of days now and I am really happy.
PSA: One of the mods on the discord are claiming that people can actually see the source code of Obsidian within the app - haven’t tried this myself but just want others to know about it
The code is minified/obfuscated/packed so most keys and words are replaced by numbers, one letter variables, self-calling functions etc (as it should for production code for performence reasons alone). So it would be little help to assess anything at most it can help debug stuff when things go wrong.
While I respect the developers decision to make the app closed source I really wished it was better communicated. I first learnt about obsidian in a thread discussing open source note taking apps.
The websites home page talks about how Obsidian is infinity customizable and how plugins are available on Github and tells you to “do it yourself”. Everything from the service model to the about page made me think it was open source and I only learnt it was closed source when I was reading a random reddit thread.
I realize that this was partially my fault for not doing any proper research but considering who obsidian’s target audience is I think it’s closed source nature should be mentioned on the home page.
I once misunderstood an app crediting it’s open source components as meaning that the app itself was open source, so I’ve made a similar mistake, but your assumptions aren’t their responsibility. If it doesn’t say it’s open source and it doesn’t link to its source code, it’s probably not open source.
I have run into an odd issue with Obsidian on Wayland where dragging and dropping panes doesn’t work. My system configuration is pretty niche (Wayland on Linux), so understandably the team can’t devote much time towards an issue like this. Still, it’s a big deal to me, and as a software engineer I’d love to just fix it myself.
I’ve spent several hours debugging the issue in the devtools, but working with the minified code is not easy, even after prettifying it. I’ve narrowed the location of the bug down to an event handler callback, but there is a lot of interdependent logic, making it difficult to figure out exactly what’s going on.
If Obsidian were open source, I’m pretty confident I could diagnose and fix the issue myself.
As I told in the BR, obsidian does not use OS specific code for handling events. I don’t believe this is an Obsidian problem. Nevertheless, you are welcome to join the discord chat and report you accurate findings to devs directly.
Personally, I downloaded the releases from a github repo that contained json files etc., so I (yes, mistakenly, but…) assumed that this WAS open source. I’ve gone on to invest a lot of time and effort into it, and even started developing a plugin for it.
Then it occurred to me that I should maybe create a fork of the code, just in case it’s ever taken down. And there IS NO CODE.
Yes, technically my mistake. Arguably very misleading on Obsidian’s part, though.
You can just download a copy of the installer… Sure it’s not the source code. But if Obsidian went poof tomorrow, you’d still have full access to all your notes. Because it’s offline by default
It’s not misleading on Obsidian’s part. Nowhere does it state on their homepage that they’re opensource. Just because they’re privacy centric and offline first… doesn’t mean they’re open source.
If they were open source, it would be advertised in big on their homepage or even in the title of their homepage in the Google Search results.
Logseq does that, because they are open source.
Note that because of the open nature of markdown files. You aren’t limited to Obsidian. A handful of people are using both Logseq and Obsidian at the same time. Because they’re mostly compatible with each other to a certain degree.
I think your reasoning would be more valid if this was a cloud service that could shut down any day and all your data would be gone or inaccessible. That’s not the case with Obsidian. Even if the internet went away, you would still have access to your notes
Could you link the repo? I didn’t try all (there are many), but the download links I tried on Obsidian’s website all link to direct downloads (except one that links to Flathub for the flatpak).
No, you’re conflating data/app access with source access. I agree that the ability to access data via the app itself is important, but even if we had that written in stone, with a signed contract from the company saying that they’d always keep the binary available (or we simply backed up the binary), that gives no guarantees that it will remain an open platform worth investing time and effort in, or even that the app will continue to work on future platforms, like windows 12 or Linux 6. That’s why open source is important, and that’s what people assume when they find a git repo with a bunch of source in it.
Like I said, I was wrong to assume, but it IS misleading to post a non-source repo on github. No amount of protest will change the fact that most people think “github repo” means “source code repo”.
But yes, I’ve found Logseq and tried it out and it looks more promising as a reliably open source solution (and might even have a better fundamental architecture, although it’s more limited right now). Thanks for pointing it out.
it’s an electron app, generally those things keep working regardless of platform or are easily sandboxable
it’s not misleading. There are sh*t tons of companies that have github repo’s without being open source.
Obsidian doesn’t mention anywhere on their homepage that it is open source or that it even has repo’s. The homepage mentions Github twice, once to show an example of Markdown usage and a second time to show that community plugins are stored there.
Again, it’s not misleading. You just mislead yourself
at most it can help debug stuff when things go wrong.
