Comment by wkat4242
2 months ago
> Obsidian isn't open source by most reports.
On FreeBSD I can build a full copy from source (in fact I have to, there is no binary package). The only issue seems to be licensing, not source availability. Personally I don't care about licensing (I completely ignore it all anyway) and it doesn't stop you from inspecting the source code.
I think Obsidian is a really great package, I just happened to have moved over from OneNote which is horrible Microsoft mediocrity and doesn't even have a Linux app. And the web version is really useless, it needs to refresh every day and it can only search within the same tab, not a whole notebook. Such a mess. Obsidian is so quick and efficient <3 And there is full self-hosted syncing available, which I also use.
Obsidian on Android source seems not available. Even generally the reports seems that source is not available.
May be the freebsd build is using some binary library packages?
A cursory search indicates that one of the freebsd 'build-scripts' used for installing obsidian uses a binary package for obsidian itself, not building it from source.
It strange that about obsidian which seems to be rather popular here has many people thinking that it is open source, when it is not.
You probably mean this one: https://github.com/jgrafton/freebsd-obsidian
That's just a user contributed thing though. It's also just in the official ports collection. There's only a makefile there and some config files for electron (electron is kinda a PITA to compile on FreeBSD because there's no package)
Now, it can update itself automatically but it's all JavaScript. No binaries.
But it's safe enough for me anyway. Especially because the dev community uses it do much. If it did something untoward it would be noticed quickly.
The "official" packages seems derived from the Nix build for Obsidian, which is using binary caches to get the Obsidian binary is what I could understand.