Thank you for all the thoughtful responses on this matter. I agree that from the perspective of a user, what you’re saying makes sense.
I would like to point out that despite our best attempts to align our interest with our users like you, we fundamentally still operate from with the perspective of a business framework. I think this is where there’s a fundamental misunderstanding between your arguments and the rest of the discussions here.
We are proud to be generous in our offerings. We give away the rights to use the app completely for free for personal use. We don’t show ads. We don’t track any user data behind your backs. We don’t sell your data to shady companies for dollars. We don’t lock in your data into our format or platform. In fact, we go to great lengths to ensure our data format is compatible with other tools when possible.
This is unfair. This is morally guilt-tripping us into surrendering more than we’d like.
We as a business have to evaluate such decisions not only from our user’s perspective, but also from a business perspective. We make decisions that allows our long-term survival as a business. We do our best to reduce unnecessary business risks.
To recap,
- As a user, it would be great if the app can continue to work if we go out of business.
- As a business, we don’t want to go out of business.
- As a user, it would be great if there’s a lot of “competition”.
- As a business, it’s really stressful if competitors can take your work, copy it and sell it as their own. Licenses don’t prevent copying, and lawsuits are expensive and time consuming.
I think we are both right, but for us as a business it just makes more sense to stay close sourced. This is unlikely to change for the foreseeable future.
If open-source is a must for you, then you are very well within your rights to choose an open-sourced alternative. Joplin, Zettlr, Foam, Dendron, Logseq are all great open sourced alternatives.
If you are unsatisfied with the alternatives, and believes that Obsidian is truly excellent, then I would invite you to consider that maybe, just maybe, some parts of this success can be attributed to the close sourced magic sauce.