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Comment by hoherd | Hacker News Reader

I was unaware of this until a few weeks ago, so I'd like to raise awareness for anybody who it affects: Obsidian is not FOSS, and purchasing a license is required for any work that generates revenue at a for-profit company of 2 or more people.

https://obsidian.md/license

Obsidian looks awesome to me, and for a long time I've been thinking about adopting it, but this licensing issue caused me to back away and look for alternatives. I'm not suggesting that paying for software is a bad idea, but the free distribution of it led me to believe that it is FOSS, and it is not.

https://obsidian.md/pricing

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It's what caused me to pick it. Selling usage for commercial use is a smart move, and I want to ensure the original developers are incentivized to keep working on the product.

That didn‘t work so much for Dynalist.

This one? https://dynalist.io/

Looks like it's still alive and kicking. I guess you're probably upset by a lack of updates or something - luckily upgrading to a paid plan would be a good way to incentivize whoever is developing it to continue working on it, at least at the margin.

I‘ve never been a customer, I‘m using Workflowy.

What you missed is that the paid offer didn‘t stop the developers to lose interest and… start Obsidian!

Long-term heavy Workflowy and later Dynalist user here. I am not upset that the developers started working on Obsidian instead, since I see Obsidian as the superior product, which has replaced both Workflowy and Dynalist for me.

Both Workflowy and Dynalist were treated as finished software for years. Workflowy did pick up again when it started losing customers.

Subscriptions do motivate ongoing development, but only if there's a threat to stop going or start incurring subscriber losses. Product software categories have different ratios of customers who buy subscriptions for the current utility vs the investment into future utility.

I made the choice at the time I knew this, and preferred FOSS, but the alternatives just wasn’t as usable, so in the end I still chose this, partly because at least I still have complete control over the data (not true for some alternatives.

P.S. my comparison was done probably a few years ago and the landscape could have changed quite a bit. One solution I tried was a code extension that promised to do something similar. I thought it would be good as I use vscode all the time. Then I find out it is bad because exactly of that. Obsidian and the like is dedicated to notes taking so this single software is unambiguously for that task. In vscode there’s just too much other things going on as distraction.

While Obsidian may not be FOSS at all, my understanding is that in general needing to purchase a license is orthogonal to whether something is FOSS - correct?

If you cannot use the software however you wish (including for profit) then it is not Free Software. The developers can choose to not distribute the software to you unless you pay, and they can choose to provide support if you pay (which if you're making a profit from their software is a reasonable thing to pay for), but with Free Software the developers cannot decide how you use it once they have distributed it to you.

However, this becomes less significant when the applications are interoperable. If you ever stop using Obsidian, you can just grab your files and use another Markdown editor on top.

The big win for Obsidian here is that everything is just saved as markdown, so you're not locked in even with their license.

What I am wondering about is that although the basic files are markdown, some of the plugins might be proprietary. So that the part of the contents in the markdown files in effect creates a lock-in?

Potentially. I don't use many of the plugins so I can't say with authority.

I would suggest editing and reading the markdown files in other editors to make avoid getting "locked in."

You certainly could create your own lock-in by making some unique workflow that requires a combination of plug-ins to function. The plugins are all third party, some of them are just annotating the existing markdown files, some are just visual.

So you only use Obsidian for its vaults/syncing?

My workflow isn't reliant on Obsidian's plugins, they just make stuff easier.

Like having a template for my Daily Note that also automatically includes all files tagged #todo using Data View. Or a few global shortcuts via Keyboard Maestro that open specific notes on Obsidian.

I could maybe whip up a similar system in a day on top of any editor that can render Markdown and handle links, but now I don't need to.

No, becasue the plugins are just JavaScript running against markdown that generally produce more markdown. You might get a plugin that produces an image and that would "stop working"; but it hard for the JS to be locked down/etc.

I think it’s pretty likely that a lot of Obsidian users use it for their professional activity without paying.

Personally I haven’t considered it because of that. I have no use for a complex notes app in my private life, and there’s no way my employer would pay for the subscription.

> I have no use for a complex notes app in my private life

I thought so too, but then I noticed I was searching the internet for the same things over and over again. (Or asking it from GPT).

Then I started writing stuff down as I searched it, with a sentence or two of my own text + a few tags.

Now I can find stuff directly from Obsidian (or more like from the set of markdown files on my drive) instead of having to sweep the internet _again_ for the same thing.

That really belongs in the browser I think. Ideally we could just highlight the info we want to save, type a note, and the whole page gets saved offline as plain HTML, along with a markdown file that points to it.

Pocket is about as close as it gets it seems...

You can use the combination of SingleFile ( https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile/) and Obsidian/Templater for that.

This doesn't bother me. If there was a FOSS alternative I'd be all for it. But I can't fault them for charging for good software.

And also no Synching with a subscription!

When I already have access to the iCloud ecosystem, and Notes is excellent across iOS and macOS, I have never really seen much point in trying to use Obsidian.

But then maybe I'm missing the point of Obsidian?

It's entirely possible to just stick your files in dropbox or something like that and they sync just fine.

I found that trying to sync (Windows Obsidian app «=» Android Obsidian app) just via a cable would get the files over fine, but would not produce usable results, at least not without a lot more fiddling that I wanted to do. I was hoping that we could simply transfer the folder structure over and just have it work, but no such luck.

Evidently it requires not only transfer, but some kind of transformation that they do in their cloud, and I'm not interested in another cloud subscription, particularly one so specific. (Happy to pay for the software & updates, just not to maintain the subscription and maintain the concern about another connection in the loop)

This was a couple years ago. Perhaps this has changed, or there's now a plugin to make such a bidirectional transfer work?

TIA for any suggestions!

What were the problems you encountered?

Obsidian creates a hidden directory in your “vault,” which contains plugin files, plus metadata about your settings, currently opened files, etc. If those settings don’t work equally well on both systems, that would be a hassle. Maybe try copying all the files from inside the directory (so that you don’t grab that hidden dir when you do) instead of grabbing the whole directory.

You might also want to look at the git-obsidian plugin. It takes a little setup, but seems to work well once it’s going.

I just backup and sync the files with google drive and everything works well, but I also don't have any plugins installed so I can't vouch for those.

There is a popular method which I use. Syncing the vault between devices with Syncthing.

It reportedly causes problems if you edit the same file in two different places at the same time, it will generate a conflict when saving since the files won't match, doesn't affect me in my workflow (if I have access to my desktop I won't use it on my phone) but YMMV

Syncthing is a wonderful predict with a short but steep learning curve.

Once you actually understand how sync works in details it does wonders.

I can highly recommend to use Git, the Obsidian Git plugin on Desktop and Termux on Android for syncing. Works great! I have documented my setup here: https://github.com/davidkopp/termux-scripts/

I think it depends on what you use notes for. Just a scratchpad of random, mostly ephemeral ideas or simple folders? Notes is probably good enough.

Obsidian is designed for those people that want to minmax their note taking and find reasons to increase productivity by providing robust linking and search capabilities within any document. The photos in the OP are a good example of how many people use Obsidian.

That said, I'm not an expert (never used it personally), but that's how I understand it.

You can sync just fine without a subscription. As you already mentioned iCloud, just put your vault there and get syncing for free.

The killer feature of Obsidian was the wikilinks, but now that other editors are getting that feature it is replaceable.

But the other killer feature is avoiding vendor lock-in. With some apps your notes are on their servers in an inscrutable data format, and some apps don't even let you export without paying. With markdown notes on the other hand you can take your notes anywhere, sync them with git, dropbox, syncthing, etc.

You're not bound to obsidian, and your markdown notes format will always be readable, unlike many of today's formats! See [1] "LibreOffice is better at reading old Word files than Word"

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38906331

you can use alternative for syncing that are quite well integrated even if a bit more complex to set up

There's a simple git-sync plugin plus you can just stick your vault in a cloud service

I'm syncing using Syncthing, across three devices which are only syncing intermittently (home laptop, smartphone, work computer), and it appears to work fine. I cannot recall ever having a sync conflict. But then again, I'm hardly using any plugins in Obsidian.

Mainly I prefer to be able to move my data around. I'm pretty sure those formats are really hard to you data out of. I know it doesn't seem like an issue now, but it might be if you ever decide to leave Apple's Ecosystem. On principle, I will not support systems that design their products to lock you into platforms.

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