Comment by _Algernon_
4 months ago
As someone paying personally for a commercial license that I use for work, I am not a fan. I like a clear business model otherwise I assume that I am the product being sold.
Edit: They should make it open source if this is the path they take. Then users can personally verify that they (or their data) isn't being sold to the highest bidder.
Obsidian makes money from its add-on services Sync and Publish. Commercial license is joining the Catalyst license as an optional ways to support Obsidian.
The problem with the Commercial license is that it wasn't clear. Many organizations were out of compliance without any way for Obsidian to enforce it, since the app is local and doesn't require sign up.
I thought it pretty clear. If it makes you money, you pay for it. And it's so inexpensive, I've never bothered to negotiate with my employer to fund it as I could easy pay it myself.
So now I am less incentiviced to pay and I have no path forward to negotiate with my employer to front money.
Regardless, I love the tool and your general approach, trying to keep things in publics hand (e.g. publishing and opening the canvas format) - so probably will still pay for it :D
I prefer using my own syncing though, as otherwise it's too expensive for "just syncing".
Thank you Steph! Your product is awesome, used continuously, and works well on all platforms (laptop, phone, etc).
I am grateful and happy that I got the opportunity to thank you here.
So, while you're almost certainly right about the impossibility of enforcement, I imagine many big organisations would purchase licenses anyway because they fear any minor risk of not doing so. Indeed, your Enterprise [0] page lists a number of big orgs with decent outlays.
Do you anticipate those companies to keep purchasing Obsidian now that it isn't a mandatory purchase for compliance?
(As a huge fan of Obsidian, and someone who personally purchased an Enterprise license to use within their company: god I hope so.)
[0]: https://obsidian.md/enterprise/
> Do you anticipate those companies to keep purchasing Obsidian now that it isn't a mandatory purchase for compliance?
I don't know. We'll see. It's somewhat unknowable, in the same way we don't know how many users didn't buy a license but should have. My guess is that for every person who bought a commercial license there are 9 who were out of compliance. We anecdotally know that many tech companies have way more Obsidian users than they report. This change will remove a lot of admin work for our team of seven.
What I do know is that even without any Commercial revenue, our other revenue streams (Sync, Publish and Catalyst) are enough to keep the lights on, and we really mean what we say in our Manifesto: "We believe that everyone should have the tools to think clearly and organize ideas effectively."
The bet is that this increases the number of people who discover Obsidian and end up buying one of our add-ons. In the future I can also see us creating add-ons that are more focused on organizational use. This change makes the pricing much clearer in that regard. I expect much fewer questions like "does Commercial include Sync?" which has been a point of confusion for years.
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The data is local, obsidian is just a markdown viewer at it's core. They have sync but that's a paid for product.
Their model is selling to large companies and sync users. Not data sales.
They also offer optional E2E encryption of synced vaults, such that you can only open them with your local password. Of course we can't know for sure that they're not peeking at the data, but it all seems above-board and I don't think it makes any sense to try and have that as a business model.
> Their model is selling to large companies
I'm not sure if that's the case now. Why would companies pay for licenses when they're optional and don't give any features?
The same reason companies contribute to FOSS projects and various charity efforts? Despite what many people believe, companies are not forced to make money at all costs.
Why should they have before? It was local and you could just use it?
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> I like a clear business model otherwise I assume that I am the product being sold
I guess you don't like using Linux neither?
Even if you pay you are the product.