I am just replying to the ignorance in this thread about what open-source means and its comparison to closed-source. This is not an appeal to go open.
I started a closed-source project back in 2003 and eventually open-sourced it, while continuing to receive money for it because the users valued my development. I am an OSS contributor to the FreeBSD OS and other projects. Playstation, Nintendo, OSX, and other companies making insane revenues, all use FreeBSD code in products they ship for which I’ve contributed to but I expect nothing from them as I know what I signed up for when I contributed based on the license used.
Some people here assume open source means anyone could fork the project and become a competitor. That’s just false. You can write a license that says you can look at the code or provide fixes but not make any derivative product or project. If someone is trying to compete with your open-sourced code that violates your license you sue them into oblivion (and they pay your legal fees). I don’t have a good response for international violations, but if someone wants to violate they are going to violate even if it means writing their own app from the ground up and copying all of your features.
Arguments about closed source being more secure are false. Even for Windows the “code” is visible by looking at the machine code. A skilled attacker is not discouraged by that. All closed-source does is obscure and prevent lazy attacks from code scanners. I learned this lesson from people reading the machine code of my binaries, cracking my protections and showing me it was futile, and I see this after years of more experience in the OS field.
Do you think the lock on your front door actually protects you? It is trivial to pick (and easy to learn), even more trivial to kick the door open, or to drill the lock. All which take mere seconds. But it makes you feel safe. At the end of the day closed-source just makes you feel safe. Abusers are going to abuse.
I’m not sure if this has been said but most of the Obsidian source is easily viewable (I would be shocked if the devs didn’t realize this). I read through its saving logic recently trying to understand some iCloud Drive problems of files getting deleted while in-use. That was helpful for me to find evidence that Obsidian isn’t necessarily the problem. Security through obscurity is not good security. Someone who wants to abuse the license agreement here already can. So in a sense the closed nature here is only limiting contributions from others and limiting the use of non-commercial use.
I think the arguments about open sourcing being for “more eyes” and “better security” are not great and is biased and plagued with assumptions. How many of YOU have read through open sourced code before in depth? If you are running an automated tool to do it for you, have you thought through what the attack and privacy vectors actually are and then audited the tool to see that it is inspecting for it? How many 20+ year bugs have been found in older OSS projects? Hint: more than you think. How many of you work at software companies and have seen the nature of code reviews? It is easy to review a trivial change’s logic but if someone submits 3000 lines of code you are more likely to just skim it for style and rely on automated tests. This is true both in open and closed source. A big difference between open and closed is that closed can keep their bugs secret and never disclose them while open typically discloses them. So the appearance of more secure is biased because we see less bugs. The fact is software has bugs. Bug backlogs in the hundreds, thousands, for newly released code is not uncommon.
There are plenty of examples of very profitable profitable opensource businesses. Business models for open-source software - Wikipedia
My personal take on the business model rant about SaaS
I purchased the “Insider” package as a point that I’m willing to pay for this as a non-commercial user. I am planning to buy in more, or yearly, once I am more committed to this app and get a better sense of the management.
Plenty of SaaS businesses have lost my business because they lost touch with their users and spend too much on overhead and not enough on their product. Or demand too much for what they provide. I have not looked seriously at Roam because just in 1 minute of looking at their site I see I would spend upwards of thousands of dollars over the lifetime of using their app. It’s absurd for my purposes of a PKM. YNAB has done nothing in a year except reskin their app, making my workflow exponentially more difficult, and then raised their price. Goodbye YNAB. Evernote had my yearly payments for a decade until they rewrote their app a few years ago (in electron I believe but it is irrelevant) and dropped features they had for years. Yes it’s their decision on what to support but user requirements and basic policy of not regressing features seems to have taken a backseat at a lot of software businesses lately. If Evernote were open-sourced I could retain the feature I wanted while still paying them for their services. But I left instead. As a user I have fear of the products I use going under, being greedy at my expense, or telling me how I want to use their app, or dropping support for features I rely on, or oddly appearing to not even use their app and creating workflows that make no sense.
I’m willing to throw money at Obsidian for as long as my trust in them and their respect for their users does not get violated, and the product remains relevant.
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