Open source / Free software comes with all the usual benefits:
- you can fork and adapt to your needs
- should the original authors stop developing it or take a direction you don't like but your started depending on it, someone can take over the development of a fork
- you can study how it works
- you can reuse some of the code to build an alternative product
- you can contribute patches if the project accepts them
- if you have to migrate, even if the format is specific, you can at least check how it works
That thing being open source is a big plus, and Obsidian using a standard format is a big plus.
That's like saying "you do not need oracle to use your bytes on disk". I may be mistaken but doesn't obsidian provide a ton of functionality on top of markdown?
No, just a little bit. Your docs remain 98% compatible with other Markdown editors. The functionality is mainly around a.) better UI for editing Markdown, b.) plugin ecosystem (optional), c.) paid sync (optional, and achievable otherwise e.g. SyncThing, your own rsync script, etc), and d.) optional (and very bad) "publish-as-a-website" feature.
The plugins are no small thing though. I replaced Anki with a spaced repetition plugin, now my notes can be flashcards and I don't need to maintain two separate apps.
Also the UI for search and navigation is much better than just a collection of Markdown files. I rolled my own note system using Markdown before this. Obsidian is way better.
If you only use standard Markdown. But the advocacy often focuses on DataView and a thousand other features that are simply not available without Obsidian.
True, but it seems very obvious that if you add a bunch of plugin dependencies (or even one), you are deliberately choosing to forego "standard" Markdown (there's actually no such thing, but roughly speaking).
That's why they're plugins.
I do use the Excalidraw plugin, but nothing much else, and that is why I have an easy time making my Obsidian notes web-accessible (currently, via SilverBullet, but any tool that makes markdown web-editable will work — as long as you don't go nuts with plugins, that is).
Having said that, I think the reason Obsidian "failed" — to the extent that Notion and some others have massively more adoption amongst organizations larger than me and my gray beard – is that they failed to combine their (super awesome) files-and-folders approach with a web editable solution.
They thought - obviously wrongly, in hindsight — that web accessible would be enough.
It's not. It's the 10%, Notion etc cover the 90% (but with fairly bad tradeoffs, they have export and it works, but you can't easily interop with your data where it lives).
But I've had such an easy time making my Obsidian web-editable that I suspect in a few minutes (or months) Obsidian will be like heyyyyy... edit yo vault via web yo — and for free! and then we will all be like woo Obsidian boo Notion!!
The code is indeed entirely AGPL, I looked at license headers in the specific files implementing paid features. I wonder if it’s an oversight. See my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42514304 for details.
It doesn't have to be free everything to qualify for open source. The source and licence are available. You can actually bypass payment if you want to do that as the source ia there.
Yes, if SiYuan stops being developed, you can still get your notes exported as markdown files. Since SiYuan is open-source, you can also use the internal code to parse the JSON format notes.
Yes, your existing installations on your devices, whatever they are, can read your data as long as you use the correct Repo keys that are used to encrypt stuff.
In the worst case, you can deploy the docker instance with older images to keep going on.
Also you need a license for anything work related. Since I code in my work time and my free time I can't separate this clearly. To be compliant I would need a license
Obsidian has built-in support for markdown, images, PDFs, canvas (via JSON Canvas which they developed and open sourced https://obsidian.md/canvas), and others.
For databases, you can add fields/properties both in the markdown frontmatter or in the text and query it via very popular plugins: