Well then use a decent license like the GPL and force them to give you their changes back. Your ethical competitors would have to follow that.
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And who says they would survive if they were a business?
I reckon what he meant is actually that you can charge for software and still provide it as open source or charge for services like Obsidian already does.
Everybody always thinks Free Software has to be gratis.
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Sorry, it’s not clear to me what the rationale could be for comparing Zettlr as a commercial entity. Zettlr is not trying to be that.
I would argue that it’s akin to discussing how to make money from running a hotel and claiming that a community homeless shelter proves you can’t make money by offering people a place to sleep. Yes, people can spend the night in both however the scenario and goals of each establishment are completely different. Perhaps there are things they can learn from one another but there’s no sense comparing them as commercial business models since only one of the two fit that description.
An interesting comparison that might be apt however, would probably be something like Standard Notes (https://standardnotes.org/). I don’t know a great deal about them (so maybe the comparison would break down at some point) but they’ve certainly been around for while, are focused on longevity, and provide a free and open source note / kb application while operating within a commercial business context (albeit the StandardNotes model provides different services than Obsidian’s).
There are business models that rely and operate on open source but the concept or practice of open source itself, is not a business model.
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Not if the competitor’s product was online-only SaaS, but yes, you could use the Affero GPL variant to address that. However, as one of the handful of people on the planet who has litigated the GPL, I can tell you the GPL has a lot of warts, and I never recommend it even when the business case aligns with it–which, here, according to the actual founders and owners of Obsidian, it doesn’t.
Cheers and have a good weekend!
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Thanks you as well.
I think the discussion has drifted a bit so I wanted to post a reply specifically supporting this option (https://obsidian.md/privacy-statement does not mention anything yet.). I am happy to pay for Obsidian if I find it to fit well into my workflow. Everyone lecturing @Silver on how to develop a product should look at Evernote, Notion, and Roam, which seem to be doing well. I want the same for Obsidian (both because I am rooting for @Silver and @Licat and because I want the tool I will use for many years to be sustainable and supported). Note that all of those tools not only keep the source closed but also have a proprietary note format.
For the context, I am a paying user of Dynalist Pro (I am assuming @Silver == Erica at talk.dynalist.io, thank you for Dynalist!) and I am making small donations to https://logseq.com/ for that exact reason: I want to know if the company loses interest in the project (either financial or just sells the company), I will not be left with a broken workflow. I especially became conscious about this after spending quite a while migrating CI scripts from Travis across all my OSS projects to GH Actions (unfortunately, they are way more powerful than Gitlab CI and some projects cannot simply move from Github for org reasons but it’s good to know there is an open alternative). This reminded me that free lunch does not last forever.
This! 1000 times. If you want to see the difference, try asking for support on a large OSS project (I myself have mastered how to say no politely: “Thank you for filing this issue! I am focused on other things right now but I will be glad to review and merge your PR.”). Then sign up for a paid account on Dynalist and ask Erica for help! Night and day!
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Very interesting discussion. I would just like to say that @Silver and @Licat have earned my trust. What they have offered this year is paradigm changing. I cannot imagine the personal risks they are taking, but the quality of their responses here makes me willing to assume some risks too. They have eliminated or mitigated most of them for my use cases anyway.
I apologize for the tone here: I cannot arrive at a position that involves disrespect to me as a user from @Silver or @Licat.
My best wishes to all for a post covid '21…
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I really like this to be open-sourced since I like to customize and make my own vault, while I see that they made this for commercial usage and they want to make a profit from it (it’s totally okay)
I could use Zettlr and try to build upon that, or just go from scratch but I think contributing and making it open source would boost obsidian and will be created faster. like this people could develop and contribute to the project (request updates) while the main team could offer commercial usage and team support if they pay. right now obsidian is free for personal use and I appreciate that, and if they are going to make it stay like this I think giving the source wouldn’t cause harm, while the devs could spend time on support for bigger clients and online infrastructure for sync, cloud and privacy
(and no, foam doesn’t work well for me)
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It would absolutely cause harm as anyone could fork their work and develop competing products. This has been addressed in the thread.
I want Obsidian to stay closed source because I want the devs to keep developing their product and stay in business. It’s their right, they have expressed that they won’t go open source, and I am glad of their decision. This code is their invention, their hard work and their property and they are free to use it as they see fit. There are other open source projects on the market.
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There are a few open source projects build on VS Code. Especially Memo. Check it. It is almost as good as Obsidian (just lacks the graph view and of course the plugins and maybe the block references).
The features missing in the Memo can be added as extensions from the VSCode market - like for graphs there is an extension, even for todo there is a extension that works on md.
If you are a developer, you can even contribute there to make it even better 
Other than that, there is are other tools as well on VSCode like FOAM and dendrite (or dendron, sorry?), I found MEMO better than both ans much similar to Obsidian.
Just in case Obsidian goes paid, I was searching for alternatives which support Obsidian like linking and even the [[ | ]] pipe syntax.
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This is one of my favorite projects and a cornerstone of my structure. I would love to be able to help develop it and have no problem supporting it. I do believe open-sourcing it would accelerate its development and maybe create some alternatives based on it (not great for business). The forks question could be addressed with the license and I believe more than enough people will be using the sync and publish functions which would be invaluable for some. An open-source business model that comes to mind is red hat.
I’ve been looking for a project like this for years now and I’m so happy to have finally found one, being here since the early days. The only obstacle in sight is it not being open source. I’m incredibly thankful for Obsidian and development has been unbelievably rapid. I’m here to offer my support for open-sourcing it and making it the go-to knowledge management system of the future.
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There are issues with open source. If the “community” does not get excited and take it up it dies. There is just no incentive to add new and exciting features. Just go to GitHub and look at all the open source projects no one updates. KillerWhale is right, Obsidian belongs to the Obsidian team. Why would they make it open source, just to have some company swoop in and make money off a spinoff; VSCode. I know what you’re going to say, “VSCode is free”. You don’t think MS is making money off VSCode? No one works for free. You want to help support the project, help the developers? Toss a bit of coin their way. Just my two cents.
ce
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One doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the other.
Closed source companies fail as well you just don’t see their remnants out in the open.
Beside they would still develop the product on their own. It being Open Source just would allow the community to help. No one so far argued that Obsidian should become a community project.
And as it was said before:
- Open Source software doesn’t have to be gratis
- They could choose a license which would permits them to keep the code.
It’s interesting how this biases are always coming up.
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I love the idea of free and open source software. I find that in many cases open source products are better for me than proprietary. I have been using Linux (mostly Mint, MX) on all my PC’s for many years because it’s superior in many ways to OSX and Windows. I use Thunderbird, Firefox, Nextcloud over Google Drive or One Drive, Bitwarden for passwords, etc.
But in some cases open source is not better and cannot deliver what’s required, for my purposes, in the time I need it. As an example, my favorite note taking app, prior to finding Obsidian, was Joplin. It’s really great, has excellent developers, great community and features are added and refined regularly, even quickly. Despite that, after years of waiting it still hasn’t manged to deliver what I need. I’d still rather use Joplin than Evernote, Onenote, etc despite the missing features.
In many cases, I will choose a product with less features in exchange for privacy and configurability. Its not the closed source nature of many products that make them ‘bad’ but the ethics and philosophy of the developers. In the case of Obsidian, it may not be open source, but it is a superior product made by people with great ethics. Their philosophy and ethics are not just given lip service on their website but are unmistakably present in the product, in their design decisions and community involvement.
Capitalism is not going away anytime soon, what we need are more pioneers like the Obsidian team, proving that businesses can be successful and ethical at the same time.
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I don’t see any reason why the company should give up all the hard work they did.
The notes are in standard format, no one is stopping you from making a competitive product (if you can figure out how to make money on it).
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Hello everyone - I’ve recently switched to Obsidian and I’m very very much into it. I love that the developers have us, the users, in mind as the first priority.
I do wince at the idea that Obsidian is not open source, however. And for that, I do have a suggestion:
Other user-first, and privacy-first commercial companies have encountered this problem, and the license that they’ve adopted is the Business Source License, developed by MariaDB. Venueless is one of the many companies that has used the license.
Adopting this license will definitely ease my discomfort, and would meet many of the concerns raised above in this thread.
Keep up the great work. This is a product that’s made with love, and it shows.
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That’s a very interesting suggestion. It seems like that sort of idea shows true commitment to user-freedom and real, practical longevity for personal use of the tool. I notice that licence also linked to another similar one called the Fair Source License, which nearly replicates what Obsidian currently does with its business model except of course, enables more user-freedom and sets a clear boundary around commercial use. Both of these also seem like they might enable something of the benefits gained by developing free and open source software.
In my case, if I saw Obsidian using either of these, I’d finally be convinced of their sincerity committing to “A second brain, for you, forever.” – and would immediately pay for this.
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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.
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This is a truly excellent post. Thank you.
In the IT world this is simply not true.
WhatsApp wasn’t worth 22 billion because of the effort.
Another example are the prices for IT hardware, it’s crazy what kind of price cuts manufactures can make when you order as a company and not a normal customer.
In addition software can be sold multiple times after you finished the initial effort.
In my opinion, vendor lock-in to proprietary formats, marketing and initial costs of switching.
With MS there is the additional benefit of the integration with Active Directory and it’s client management.
In addition large companies often have quite “interesting” ways to defend their marketing share. Often they can just throw more money at a product than their competition.
Redhat is the best example for a company which lives Free Software and is financially successful.
Nobody says that one isn’t allowed to make money with Free Software.
Everybody who argues against releasing the code somehow seems to think that and forgets that Osidian is already gratis for personal use.
Besides, what do you think remains from Obsidian if we rip out all the Open Source parts?
My guess is, not that much and certainly nothing you can work with.
No you have to ask yourself if you would like to use a commercial software (which can be Free Software without a problem) or a community project.
Closed source software in itself doesn’t mean stable software in itself (neither does Free Software).
Apple (to use your example) broke stuff many times with updates despite being a very closed company.
Does it? No one is required to deliver updates to you when you bought the software if it isn’t written in a contract.
I’m sure there are plenty of companies who sell old software which they don’t really maintain anymore.
And you won’t know ever because you don’t even have a repository to look at.
The whole Disney example doesn’t really work for me here. That’s more an argument for making it myself instead of getting something from somewhere else.
When it comes to software that would even be a case for Open Source software because you can continue maintaining the software even after the original
developer stopped working ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
Usually there’s a central core working on and maintaining a project with many people contributing to the code. However the contributions don’t get accepted blindly into the repository, that would be insane.
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