Nothing is forever.
Especially if it is not free.
Especially if it is not open source.
If personal use is free forever but not open source, how am I supposed to believe that it will be free forever?
Color me skeptical.
Especially if it is not free.
Especially if it is not open source.
If personal use is free forever but not open source, how am I supposed to believe that it will be free forever?
Color me skeptical.
The software is already nice and very usable, even at this early beta stage. There's going to be a million users within a couple years. One thing I've noticed about the PKM community, is that there are a lot of really smart and ambitious people here. You know what that means? Community capital. Guarantee or not, if Obsidian ceases to exist, you possess your data in an open format structure in an open standard, and the latest software you had downloaded will work until a handful of those million users create an open source equivalent.
There's nothing proprietary about backlinking. It's not rocket science. Obsidian is just leading the way with a very enjoyable UX for it.
And I hope they succeed. It seems like they are genuinely seeking a nice balance between creating value for themselves and the community.
As for the rest of your post, fair point.
It's a top of the funnel to convert people at workspaces into using the tool because they're familiar with it (not talking about Obsidian specifically, but in general).
Meanwhile for the commercial customers they can offer a managed solution.
In the case it shuts down, there's now way I'll spend my time redoing my workflow or grep stuffs over all now already scattered digital documents.
We'll likely make a formal guarantee to open source in the case of us shutting down. Didn't realize that was a possibility until today.
There have been some attempts to do this (by other apps), we can look into their approach as well.
And yeah no offense taken, don't worry about it :)