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Comment by 0thgen | Hacker News Reader

I guess though with Obsidian, even if you get locked out or they dry up tomorrow, you don’t lose anything in your knowledge base because it works on top of your existing directory structure

The only thing you could get locked out of is the convenient curation that Obsidian provides

Im normally opensource-or-bust but the way obsidian is set up is pretty low risk

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That's true today, I agree.

Having watched this movie a few times, I like to have the insurance policy of open source licensing so that it stays true tomorrow.

Once something is proprietary it's arguably easier from a developer perspective - and preferred from an investor perspective - to make it steadily more proprietary over time.

Then one day you wake up and even if your notes still aren't saved in some some obtuse format that only loads properly in Obsidian, your experience has gradually degraded but by this stage you've got so much tied up in the proprietary extras that you stick around unhappily.

What are the examples you've seen do this?

Evernote, one of Obsidian’s predecessors.

Earliest example might have been AOL. Some others would be Microsoft's embrace extend extinguish, much of cloud vendors' repackaging of OSS, evernote, to a certain extent the recent Reddit and twitter API changes, IoT devices which get buyin based on open standards and then move increasingly critical features to proprietary unpublished/out of band comms.

I feel like it's quite a well-worn page of the tech playbook and I'm probably only scratching the surface here.

Obsidian is hardly AOL or Microsoft sized :)

And the second they go full evil, I can just point _any_ editor to the same directory structure and stuff will mostly Just Work.

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