Porting Obsidian to C++ and Legal Issues

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Hi,

First of all, I love Obsidian, thanks a lot for the great app!

I’ve recently migrated from Evernote Legacy to Obsidian. Evernote Legacy clients (for desktop, IOS and Android) were quite responsive because they were written using native languages for different platforms and were not electron-based. I understand the reasons for using Electron, but mobile memory footprint and startup times are terrible for such apps. That’s why I pondered to write an Obsidian runtime in C++ and integrate it into native applications. It’s still just an idea.

But now I’m mostly concerned about legal issues - can I do so without any legal implications? Can I license it. e.g. under “Apache License” and open source it?

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I am not completely sure I understand what you are trying to do nor why you are concerned about legal issue.

Obsidian is closed-source software with a license. So you can’t port Obsidian.

Of course, you may write your own note-taking app that is compatible with Obsidian’s features in whatever languages you choose.

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Your message and the link are pretty much answer my question, thanks.

Just to give a bit more more context - I was thinking to write a POC solution in C++ (an application) as a side project which might be compatible with obsidian vaults AND plugins ecosystem. If it succeeds, I might open source it. Why am I concerned with legal issues? Because before doing so, I want to be sure that time spend on it is not all for nothing due to potential legal complaints from Obsidian itself.

Would it be possible to clarify what exactly “port Obsidian” means to not cross lines that should not be crossed?