this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2025
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I don't necessarily like a few takes in the comments here.
Vibes wise the Obsidian team seems to be great and they don't seem to have shown any reason why I should distrust them. I love FOSS but gifting others my work doesn't put food on my table, so in that sense they need to have a lucrative business model which they seem to have established.
I could use SyncThing, Git or other solutions to do synchronisation between my devices but I choose to buy their Sync offer, since I want to support them (they also have EU servers, which need to be GDPR compliant by law afaik).
The closest comparison I could make is NextCloud. NextCloud open sources their software, but they sell convenience. Sure, you could self host it, but paying them to do so for you may be more attractive. In comparison Obsidian is not really complicated to set up or maintain. It's literally just a MD-editor. So the only convenient thing to sell is synchronisation if you don't want to put a price tag on the software.
If they open source all their code, some tech wizard will implement a self hosted obsidian sync server with the same convenience as theirs in a day, and the company will lose their revenue stream.
We've all been burned by tech bros in one way or another, but I think it's ok for people to profit off of their IP. And they seem to be doing so with a positive vision. Feel free to let me eat my words if they ever go rogue, but that's my 2 cents.
Someone develops logseq which is completely foss and like obsidian. Now I can choose to donate to FOSS or buy closed source. How do you decide?
We just need to establish paying for open source software more.
https://github.com/logseq/logseq/
Thanks for the rare, rational comment regarding Obsidian. Many people here seem to think releasing software as closed source automatically means you have something to hide; seemingly forgetting we live in a capitalist system in which you must constantly sell your services to survive. (I am saying this as someone who adores FOSS and donates to most of my homelab software on a regular basis).
I think a more productive way to look at is: is the closed source dev friendly (or at least non-hostile) to the open source community? In the case of Obsidian, they haven't done anything egregious, and regularly contribute to open source plugins. Furthermore, the notes are stored as markdown files. This gives the user strong resistance against potential enshittification, so even if they did go rogue you can just move to some other text editor lol. Granted, you would miss out on plugins but otherwise that's a good reason to keep your plugin usage light and plan your Obsidian vault accordingly.
Obsidian is storing everything as plaintext files. Those convenient selfhosted sync solutions have been out there for years.
It's not just about syncing files. It's also the fact I can edit stuff on my tablet and see the changes in almost real time on my laptop with Obsidian Sync. I believe most other solutions wouldn't play nice with such a workflow.
With the vault stored on a synchronized cloud drive, Proton/Google/etc the same thing happens.
Then that's a moot point I guess, haha.
Still a great way to pay for Obsidian to support the development though.
Yeah I agree, hopefully it's a rare non-evil entity that just wants to make a revenue off convenience and quality rather than some batshit shareholder nightmare monetization garbage.
Well said.
https://github.com/remotely-save/remotely-save
I use this as a backup in tandem with the official sync
And the official one works every time, remotely-save just fails randomly and I need to dig through the logs to see what happened this time
Absolutely. I just have trust issues with closed source software and platforms. Burned too many times.
I absolutely agree. That doesn't mean the software has to be closed source though, a lot of software works well when sold with paid support, especially to companies.
If the price is low enough, companies will often just pay even if they don't need the support.
That's a bit naive imho. Remaining closed source is a form of IP protection and that's really ok for what Obsidian is (a markdown editor). There's just not any benefit for them other than appreciation from FOSS enthusiasts. Also maintaining an open source repository causes a higher workload and they lose a lot of freedom.
If privacy is your concern you don't need source code anyway. It's quite easy to sandbox an application like that and analyse network traffic and such. Also Obsidian is built using Electron. That means with enough motivation one could quite easily reverse engineer most of the app. Most of the applications behaviour can also be observed via the integrated dev console, which lets you view source code.
In short I don't really see the need, unless I want to build or maintain it myself. And I think the negatives far outweigh the positives from the perspective of Obsidians team.
You don't need a public repo to be FOSS. You don't need to accept changes. All you need is to provide a copy of the source code upon request. You can even automate that with a link to a tarball or something in the app.
My concern is less about privacy and more about security and longevity (i.e. what happens if they turn evil?). If it's FOSS, I can audit the source and fork it if they go in a direction I don't like. If it's proprietary, I'm SOL if they turn evil or stop development. Projects like these tend to die.
I don't really see any negatives here. The chance that someone makes a more popular fork is incredibly low, and the chance that someone audits it and points out a bug is a lot higher. They can retain control of the name, sell the software, etc. I really don't see how providing source code is a downside.
I guess we just have to agree to disagree then. Which is fine.
Your points are valid and thank you for detailing them for me. If I was in their shoes making others able to steal my IP, even if they're not allowed due to licensing and having to deal with constant scrutiny of the source code are k.o.-criteria, which hinder the project and lead to potential revenue loss.
And it's totally fair to run your project however you choose. My point is just that FOSS doesn't automatically mean you can't make money, tons of businesses are built on a FOSS-first basis. Pick the model that works for your business, and I sincerely hope you find a way to make FOSS part of it.
As I've said. Nextcloud is a great example of FOSS working out for a business, haha.
Joplin is more directly comparable. The apps are open source and it offers sync with all kinds of targets. It monetises through a source available sync server (i.e you can run your own but you arent allowed to run it commercially) hosted by Joplin (Joplin Cloud)
For transparency im directly involved with Joplin as a volunteer (less so in recent months admittedly) so yeah, im a bit biased.
One thing that keeps me really calm about obsidian is the plaintext database. I can live with a proprietary db if the code is foss and I can fudge my data out if I need to. If code and db are proprietary, I'm not putting my data there if I can help it.