[jlos]

Why should it be opensource? Obsidian gives you complete control of your data, which it stores in an open standard.

Please explain to me why developers should act like monks who've taken a vow of poverty? The devs built something valuable, they should profit from it.

[embedding-shape]

Wait, why are you mixing the two? You can have the software be under an open source license, yet still not be a monk that has taken a vow of poverty, it's not black and white.

AFAIK (as a long-term Obsidian daily user) Obsidian makes their money on various things attached to the editor/viewer itself, but don't actually charge for the editor/viewer. Even if they did, they could still slap a FOSS license on it, and continue charging for the parts they charge for today.

I'm guessing it's something else they're worried about though, rather than those things.

I agree with your very last part though, but I don't agree you cannot make it open source at the same time.

[jlos]

I'm mixing the two because I think developers should value their time and profit from the value they add. I want them to build viable businesses so they get wealthy from their efforts and can continue keeping useful products alive.

There's no value to their business to open sourcing the product. Open source risks losing customers to knock-off competitors or fragmenting their plugin ecoystem (which is a lot of Obsidians moat).

[embedding-shape]

> I'm mixing the two because I think developers should value their time and profit from the value they add. I want them to build viable businesses so they get wealthy from their efforts and can continue keeping useful products alive.

I think exactly the same as you, but that doesn't give me the myopic view of "either you do open source or you get rich"

> There's no value to their business to open sourcing the product. Open source risks losing customers to knock-off competitors or fragmenting their plugin ecoystem (which is a lot of Obsidians moat).

You know this because you spent a whole of two minutes thinking about it?

It'd make a different bet, that Obsidian is popular today, but if they went FOSS, they'd become ubiquitous. Probably some copy-pasted competitors would appear as quickly as they'd disappear, because they're not Team Obsidian, and obviously don't know as much as Obsidian does.

But anyways, this is all speculation, I don't know for sure what would happen either, but at least I'm humble enough to know I don't know.

[backscratches]

Obsidian is free lol!

[jazz9k]

"Wait, why are you mixing the two? You can have the software be under an open source license, yet still not be a monk that has taken a vow of poverty, it's not black and white."

I don't think they are mixing the two. If they open sourced it, there would be immediate competition. Anyone could fork it and circumvent/compete with any premium features they might want to add to it in the future.

It's very hard to use this model to actually build a profitable company.

The only open source projects that can actually sustain themselves financially get handouts from large corporations (or are eventually purchased by them).

[rbits]

Well they'd just release it under a non-commercial license. The majority of their income comes from Obsidian Sync, and someone can't just host their own version of Obsidian Sync for all the Obsidian users for free. And there are already self-hosted alternatives to Obsidian Sync, in fact Obsidian even endorses them themselves[1].

As for their other paid service, Obsidian Publish, since all Obsidian notes are in plain markdown there are already many free alternatives.

So open sourcing would not harm any of those income streams. It's not about Obsidian losing profit. If you want to read the actual reasons they have decided not to open source Obsidian, they have talked about it on their forums[2]

[1] https://obsidian.md/help/sync-notes [2] https://forum.obsidian.md/t/open-sourcing-of-obsidian/1515/1...

[joemi]

> So open sourcing would not harm any of those income streams.

Obsidian's income streams are based on Obsidian having easy-to-use easy-to-setup ways to sync and publish built-in. If Obsidian were open source, someone could fork it and remove or replace those built-in methods, which has the potential to harm their income streams. Whether it actually would and by how much depends on a lot of unknowns and is all just conjecture, but _if_ such a fork became somehow more popular than Obsidian proper, that'd definitely affect them.

[embedding-shape]

> If they open sourced it, there would be immediate competition. Anyone could fork it and circumvent/compete with any premium features they might want to add to it in the future.

Would it? Something like Zulip seems like a way better target in that case, but Zulip seems to manage just fine with open-source code and running their own platform people can pay for.

Not saying it is easy nor not hard, I'm just saying I don't agree with "either you do open source, or you go broke" because history shows us there are more choices than that.

[auggierose]

Zulip manages so well that their top-people just left Zulip and joined Anthropic.

[embedding-shape]

Zulip got a foundation at the same time, literally the best that could have happen to the FOSS parts of it, basically a dream come true for the people relying on it to continue being FOSS.

[auggierose]

Let's see in a few years how the development of Zulip has progressed by then. It is not a foundation like Zig, where the main guy is actively working on it. It is the best that could have happened, except of course the top people staying on.

[bityard]

Reading their other comments, they are under the mistaken impression that every line of code written by a human should have a dollar sign attached to it.

No consideration given that lots of people contribute voluntarily to open-source projects or even release their projects/code for free because they enjoy writing code and engaging with the broader open source or free software community.

[jlos]

> every line of code written by a human should have a dollar sign attached to it.

Every line of code that adds value should have some of that value should GO BACK INTO THE PROJECT.

I'm against the idea a successful product should be open source, even when you have full conrol of your data and they only charge for convenience.

Its an assinine philosophy that makes for WORSE products. Your projects would do better with revenue. More time, better marketing, other people to help.

Octave developer gave up after 25 years[0]. Instead of a robust competitor with a full team of people working on it and generational wealth for the value he created, he gave up struggling to pay bills.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13603575

[bityard]

I'd argue that after 25 years, he waited FAR too long for his hobby to somehow turn a profit and would probably be in a much better place now if he'd had gotten a real job a couple decades sooner. "1. Write a bunch of code. 2. Wait for money to flow in." is a terrible business model.

It's also the case that most open source projects just simply do not provide the value that their authors think they do. Think of all the paintings, books, and music ever written. Not the ones you've seen, I mean ALL the ones ever created by any human anywhere. Only a small percentage of what is actually produced ends up being good enough for people to talk about and/or pay actual money for. Software is no different. (And is in fact almost certainly much worse.)

I never want to be paid for writing code, that would take all the fun out of it. But I wish you all the best!

[gbro3n]

I think there is a special value in open source when it comes to a personal knowlege base. We invest so much time in it, and we need to know that it's not going to be taken away from us, or made unaffordable. I made https://www.asnotes.io (basically obsidian with markdown and nested wikilinking in a VS Code extension), because I wanted and thought others would want something that is a) open source and b) version control friendly so we don't even have to rely on a sync server being there in the future.

[embedding-shape]

> We invest so much time in it, and we need to know that it's not going to be taken away from us

Agreed, but in the case of Obsidian, since the way they manage the data, they cannot just "take it away from us", it'll always sit where you leave it, as it's not a SaaS or a remote service. And even if the desktop client went away, all your data and notes are still available.

Otherwise I generally agree with you, all my professional and personal tooling shouldn't be able to take away agency from me, but it's worth separate the tooling from the data, as loosing the tooling sucks but loosing the data is a lot worse, at least they cannot do that.

[jlos]

Agree wholeheartedly, but you already have that with Obsidian. You own the vault, and if you don't want obsidian, its already in markdown.

[DarkUranium]

Considering Microsoft's been making more and more of VSCode non-FOSS, I'm pretty sure using it as your base is at odds with your goals.

[utopiah]

> explain to me why developers should act like monks who've taken a vow of poverty? The devs built something valuable, they should profit from it.

No, don't bully others into a fake argument about your weird fantasies.

They never said that developers should be poor. That's also incorrect. Please don't pull others into this kind of toxic discussions.

[himata4113]

Not saying they have to be, it's just a weird assumption that I've built up in my head. Possibly because obsidian handles sensitive data and I somewhat was under the impression it has the open-source tier scrutiny when it came to inner workings of the app.

[simonmales]

It's a personal bias for me.

Perception of quality, because the author is under constant review.

[soldeace]

Not everyone feels comfortable running third-party opaque code in their computers.

[auggierose]

Most people paying money for software do, though.

[antiframe]

Which is why I think Obsidian is such a weird piece of software. It's free. It doesn't lock your own data behind a paywall. But, it only allows you to modify it in very specific plugin API ways. I pay for software all the time, and I don't expect it to be open source. But for software I don't pay for, I do expect it to be open source.

[auggierose]

That is an interesting point, and you are probably not alone in that opinion. From a logical point of view, it makes no sense to me, though. Just view it as a purchase that costs $X, but where the author of the software provided you with a voucher worth $X. Why should not paying anything for the software give you the right to modify and fork it as you like, whereas you accept that constraint for software you paid for? Just accept that there is free software which is not open-source. You don't have to "buy" it.

[antiframe]

I think my thought process goes: I prefer free software (as in freedom, not beer). But, sometimes the author wants to charge money for it so they restrict that freedom to protect their business. I have yet not fully grasped the author doesn't want to charge money for the software but they restrict that freedom anyway.

[kepano]

On the other hand, that may be part of the reason why Obsidian has such a rich plugin ecosystem. Perhaps there is less of an incentive to build a good plugin API if you can just tell people to fork instead.

[antiframe]

Emacs and vim don't suffer from the "I'll fork it to make my pet feature" problem. Why would Obsidian?

[kepano]

The two are not mutually exclusive?

[tomcam]

Did GP edit the post? Please explain to me where they stated that developers should act like monks who’ve taken a vow of poverty?

I completely agree with the sentiment of your reply at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48181203 btw