Comment by embedding-shape

9 hours ago

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.

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embedding-shape

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jlos  8 hours ago

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  8 hours ago

    > 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.

bityard  8 hours ago

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.

jazz9k  8 hours ago

"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  7 hours ago

    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  4 hours ago

      > 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  7 hours ago

    > 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.