[ericax]

Hi there! Sorry it's our first time doing a license like this.

If I understand correctly, licenses are usually written more strictly for legal purposes, but in my opinion your use case sounds like it should belong to personal use.

If anyone has pointers for us to make the license text more clear, please let me know!

[_frkl]

I would not write my own license. I'd really recommend you get a lawyer look over the text you have (that shouldn't be too expensive, it's a one time cost), or look at existing ones that are actually written by lawyers. For a public license (to restrict commercial use), I'd recommend both LicenseZero Prosperity ( https://prosperitylicense.com/versions/3.0.0 ) and the Polyform licenses ( https://polyformproject.org/ ).

For the private license, you could use/adapt the LicenseZero Private license ( https://licensezero.com/licenses/private ).

Those are more geared towards developer tools, so I'm not sure whether they'd be a good fit for your product. But all of them are written in simple to understand language so you should be able to figure that out by youself, and at the very least get a few pointers. If not, that is considered a bug with the license, and both projects are very open to feedback.

[cxr]

Obsidian folks: please don't use any of the aforementioned licenses. The reality is that they're _not_ a good fit (although the author would probably love to get you as a client to handle your EULA and convince you to use one of the others for your eventually-open-source plans, and that would be an even worse idea).

[_frkl]

Why are they not a good fit? From a shallow reading, I thought Prosperity and the Polyform licenses would be fairly similar in intent to the licenses they have on their page. I can't imagine the authors (not author) of Polyform/Prosperity would care either way, and since nobody ever claimed those are open source licenses I don't understand your other ill-made point either. Maybe you refer to the Parity license? That one would make no sense in this context at all, and I doubt anybody would suggest it here.

Also, since your post is fairly negative and unsubstantiated overall, would you care to suggest an alternative?

[Aeolun]

Give them an alternative?

[Xophmeister]

Licenses are written by people versed in the appropriate laws. That’s why they come across as “more strict”, for precision’s sake. However, one should be very careful about trying to emulate legal precision just by virtue of stricter language.

[Reelin]

> licenses are usually written more strictly for legal purposes

Well written legal documents are precise (not strict). The trouble is that you haven't unambiguously defined what qualifies as personal use, and there are a rather large number of obvious edge cases. This is a good example of something that should be drafted by a qualified attorney.

[ncallaway]

As a feedback from me: the license doesn't leave any room for evaluation on the commercial side.

90% of the notes I generate are for my business, and probably ~10% of my notes are for personal stuff. The volume of personal notes isn't enough to be worth having my notes separated out while I trial Obsidian. Since I can't put any of my commercial notes in it without paying for it, I'm just giving up trying it.

If Obsidian works well for me, I'd definitely consider putting down $50/year for it. The price seems a little high to me, but if it works well, then I'd probably do it. But the license doesn't let me evaluate it, so I won't be able to find out if it works well for me. $50/year is way too high for me to put down to see if I like it.

A 14-day or 30-day evaluation period in the commercial license text would be really helpful to letting me see if Obsidian works for me.

[crooked-v]

The simple answer is: don't write your own software license, because if you're not a lawyer (or if you're a lawyer not specialized in this area of law), you'll get it wrong.