Comment by pityJuke
4 months ago
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.)
> 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.
Awesome to hear. Best of luck!