6 ms·
Out of curiosity, why do you prefer open source in this case?
by cl42 3y ago
Out of curiosity, why do you prefer open source in this case?
- jddj 3y agoNot OP but for me it's to avoid the following playing out: 1. gradually, more vendor lockin (read: not plain markdown) features are added 2. greater focus on monetization 3. exit 4. go to #2. In some products this doesn't matter. In a personal knowledgebase it might.
- cl42 3y agoI appreciate that, thanks for sharing! If Obsidian didn't have plain markdown + regular folders, I would also avoid it.
- 0thgen 3y agoI 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
- jddj 3y agoThat'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.
- qup 3y agoWhat are the examples you've seen do this?
- throwup238 3y agoEvernote, one of Obsidian’s predecessors.
- jddj 3y agoEarliest 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IoT devices which get buyin based on open standards and then move increasingly critical features to proprietary unpublished/out of band comms.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.
- theshrike79 3y agoObsidian 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jskherman 3y agoThere are ways to get around the lockin just like with Evernote. It's not easy nor clean as with any attempt to migrate but one way to do it is via Pandoc and Lua Filters to transform custom syntax to other forms. For Obsidian, I was able to write a Lua filter for Callouts to convert to Hugo shortcodes/Quarto's callouts based on someone's previous work. I also want open-source for PKM software but I realized I value getting things done more if there were no near alternatives for my use case. I tried Logseq but it's straying even further from vanilla Markdown than Obsidian and is not as well-polished.
- D13Fd 3y agoThe good thing is that there are several options for similar apps right now. If Obsidian tries to do vendor lock in stuff, I’ll just move to one of the other options.