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Comment by jazz9k | Hacker News Reader

"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).

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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...

> 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.

> 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.

Zulip manages so well that their top-people just left Zulip and joined Anthropic.

Zulip got a foundation at the same time, literally the best that could have happen to the FOSS parts of it, basically a dream come true for the people relying on it to continue being FOSS.

Let's see in a few years how the development of Zulip has progressed by then. It is not a foundation like Zig, where the main guy is actively working on it. It is the best that could have happened, except of course the top people staying on.

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