Open Sourcing of Obsidian

[WhiteNoise]

@owlyph

These are all interesting and I think, were good points to reflect on. Yet, they don’t resolve the contradiction inherent to Obsidian’s approach. If you look at things from the perspective of a user (which I suppose most people on this forum ought to do as it appears Obsidian as an organization, is two people at the moment) then you have a lot of motivation for the tools you use to be free and open source software (particularly in Obsidian’s phrasing, this “incredibly personal” case).

These are your opinions, so let’s not just assume that every user is onboard with those.

@owlyph

First, regardless of whether Obsidian ever accepts changes from anyone outside of their organization, you can be sure that the code of the application is available if indeed someday the company dies/gets bought by people with bad intentions/etc. and that means there is at a minimum, the potential for someone else to continue it in its original form. And you/us as users to feel some confidence that our work with this tool will not be inconveniently disrupted. Anyone migrating to Obsidian from another tool, probably has dealt with such pain.

As @Silver hinted in previous reply, longevity of software is more likely if some devs can put food on the table with it, not just by releasing the code and hoping that someone will continue doing the the work for free.
The devs aren’t as confided as you are about the viability of opensource for small consumer apps. They may be wrong but it’s within their right to make this call.

@owlyph

Second, fundamentally, users retain the freedom to use our computers and applications as we determine (as opposed to having it controlled by a third-party)–that’s a basic and ethical courtesy to users. It communicates respect.

It’s courtesy sure, but all the windows users, mac users, ios users are not receiving it and yet they are fine with it. I wouldn’t go as far as call unethical someone who doesn’t want to make a project open source.

@owlyph

Having the code available, sure a competitor could fork it and offer their own product but that would only really matter if Obsidian were trying to make money from selling licence seats, which it isn’t… the benefits of paying for their model is mostly that you receive support and insider access… that has nothing to do with licence seats of software. Competitors offer similar products and services already, this is kind of a non-issue. In fact, depending on the type of open source licence used, “competition” can be turned into a useful thing.

Obsidian is not free for commercial use. And don’t forget about the add-ons. Why would you wanna give someone else everything to start offering the same service?

@owlyph

I say this stuff, again, because I think Obsidian is great. I would like to adopt it. I would like to pay for their services. I cannot do that without an ethical licence that respects my user rights and efforts, which based on Obsidian’s own statements, it seems like they’d agree with. Why not take the stance to its logical and accurate conclusion and offer an open source application?

There are pros/cons in open source and there are pros and cons in closed source.
You are free to do what you want and support whichever product you see fit. But ultimately, you gotta accept that other people may see it differently.