Having read through this discourse, I wanted to throw in my perspective and thoughts.
Perspective
I’d like to focus on the term, “Intellectual Property.” Note that the second word is Property. It’s property. The owners can do with it whatever they wish. And the countless hours of effort that went into its creation is real investment. Or, as the old prospector said in the movie, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, “An ounce of gold, mister, is worth what it is because of the human labor that went into the finding and the getting of it.” In other words, it’s the effort that imbues value into the product. As a result of this perspective, I find the browbeating to be beyond the pale. I, for one, am grateful for their hard work and the allowance of a free license for personal use. This is beyond generous.
Commercial versus Open-Source
I’m going to say something controversial, based on observation: Truly successful software is not open-source. If you think that it is, you simply aren’t looking at enough history. We can keep forking what was Star Office until the Sun burns out (pun intended), but it will still not enjoy anywhere near the success of MS Office. Why is that? Because the relationship between a commercial product and its customers is one of symbiosis. The company gets fed, and the customer gets certain guarantees in return. This relationship simply doesn’t exist in the open-source world. I find it humorous that some folks will only feel comfortable using Obsidian if it’s open-source; I feel the exact opposite!
Right about now, I’m sure some folks want to tell me to look at Linux as a huge success. It is, but because of commercial investment. There are plenty of distros, but I don’t know of any company that would run their HR system on Linux Mint. However I’m sure there are plenty of companies that would use RedHat. When it comes to the survival of the enterprise, it’s all about the support, and those guarantees. So I have to ask myself, am I better off with Open source so I’ll have the source code I’ll never get around to reading, and have to rely on the kindness of strangers for support, or am I better off with commercial software that is routinely maintained, with regular release cycles, and those nice guarantees? That is, after all, what we’re paying for when we buy commercial software. If this is not what you want, then maybe what you want is a hobby, not something that absolutely, positively, has to work.
All software can go away, but it’s a matter of how it goes away that’s important. Commercial software has stated end-of-life dates; open-source rots in place. If a company goes under, typically the intellectual property is sold. No one throws out something that can be monetized. Open source just dies, and you don’t know it until either you visit the repository and discover it hasn’t been updated in three years, or you upgrade your OS and it stops working. Whoops.
My trust model
A number of years ago, I took my son to Disney World and had an epiphany. We were walking out of Animal Kingdom, and I noticed these really nice hanging lamps along the path, with metal shades craved as a silhouette of animals. I stopped by the Guest Services and said, “You probably can’t answer this, but I’d love to know where those lamps on the path came from.” An assistant came out with a camera, had me walk him to the lamps, and he took a photo of one and told me it would be sent to the Imagineering team and I should get an email in a couple of days. (Now that’s service.) Sure enough, two days later, I got the answer: they make them in-house. My first thought was, why go through the trouble of designing and manufacturing such a thing in-house? And then it hit me. They want control. If, a few years after the lights are installed, a worker carrying a ladder accidentally breaks one, they cannot be told by a supplier, “Sorry, that model is discontinued.” Now they have one light that’s different? That was the epiphany. Every time you rely on a product or service, you give up a certain amount of control.
It is inevitable that we must rely on some products and services, and therefore give up some control, and this is a matter of trust. Trust is a tricky thing. What’s important to know here is that I minimize the number of trust relationships I must establish, in order to minimize risk and keep greater control. This means I minimize software vendors. There’s a very good reason why I use the Mac OS instead of Windows or Linux for my most important data; the base OS does so much. On Windows, it seems like you have to install yet another .exe for every little thing you want to do. Each one of those is a malware risk. On Unix systems, so much more facility is baked right in. When I use a Mac, I have to extend a trust relationship to Apple, and very few other entities. On Windows, you’re extending trust to every .exe you download. Not good. And as for Linux, it’s great, (I’m typing this on Linux running in a VM that does not have access to the host storage) but I’d have to be willing to trust everyone who works on it. And that’s the other big difference between open-source and commercial software. The MacOS may be written by many people, but it’s all written as a single entity, with a single legal agreement and the guarantee this imports. Open-source software is written by a loosely-coupled group of strangers with no ultimate responsibility for the outcome.
Landing the Plane
So, that’s why I use a Mac, appreciate commercial software, and can appreciate Obsidian’s position. I can appreciate Open Source for what it is, but can’t rely on it for what it isn’t.
