Obsidian is now free for work - Obsidian
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I don't necessarily like a few takes in the comments here.
Vibes wise the Obsidian team seems to be great and they don't seem to have shown any reason why I should distrust them. I love FOSS but gifting others my work doesn't put food on my table, so in that sense they need to have a lucrative business model which they seem to have established.
I could use SyncThing, Git or other solutions to do synchronisation between my devices but I choose to buy their Sync offer, since I want to support them (they also have EU servers, which need to be GDPR compliant by law afaik).
The closest comparison I could make is NextCloud. NextCloud open sources their software, but they sell convenience. Sure, you could self host it, but paying them to do so for you may be more attractive. In comparison Obsidian is not really complicated to set up or maintain. It's literally just a MD-editor. So the only convenient thing to sell is synchronisation if you don't want to put a price tag on the software.
If they open source all their code, some tech wizard will implement a self hosted obsidian sync server with the same convenience as theirs in a day, and the company will lose their revenue stream.
We've all been burned by tech bros in one way or another, but I think it's ok for people to profit off of their IP. And they seem to be doing so with a positive vision. Feel free to let me eat my words if they ever go rogue, but that's my 2 cents.
Joplin is more directly comparable. The apps are open source and it offers sync with all kinds of targets. It monetises through a source available sync server (i.e you can run your own but you arent allowed to run it commercially) hosted by Joplin (Joplin Cloud)
For transparency im directly involved with Joplin as a volunteer (less so in recent months admittedly) so yeah, im a bit biased.
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I like obsidian specifically because you don't need to rely on some built-in sync tool. The files are right there and in a sane format, you can sync them however you want. I use syncthing for this at home, but the choice is yours
I tested it at work (we used Obsidian for a while to build an IT Knowledgebase but since moved away from it) and it really couldn't be simpler.
The main thing that keeps me from trying it is that in order to pay with PayPal you have to use some janky workarounds... As soon as they figure that out I'll absolutely consider it
I've heard about syncthing but fear that it won't be compatible with all my devices
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Wdym by bypass obsidian Sync? Do you have the link for said plug-in?
I mean not use the official paid sync to sync your notes... The plugin is in the official plugin store
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It's regrettable that Obsidian isn't open source. But the nice thing about it is that its data store is just a bunch of markdown files in a folder structure, and very easily migrated to any other application. They may have the code but they don't take the data hostage like a lot of commercial software does.
It’s insane obsidian isn’t open source, since it’s just a fancy vscode plugin or fork basically (idk how they developed it obviously but that’s all you’d need to do). That’s why I don’t use it. It’s too simple not to be OSS
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It's interesting that a closed-source app has good reputation among FOSS enthusiasts. Surely they are not a Microsoft or Apple, but still who controls your computer, you or them?
I just cant wrap my head around why they're willing to go so far to gain good will from people by having such a generous free tier, but somehow licensing the code under a FOSS license is out of the question??
Why not just go all the way and make sure everyone who cares about reading the souce could also give you free contributions?
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I tested it at work (we used Obsidian for a while to build an IT Knowledgebase but since moved away from it) and it really couldn't be simpler.
The main thing that keeps me from trying it is that in order to pay with PayPal you have to use some janky workarounds... As soon as they figure that out I'll absolutely consider it
I've heard about syncthing but fear that it won't be compatible with all my devices
Syncthing works great for me. I don't use it on my phone but I know there's an android version.
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There's also syncthing, which allows syncing a folder... Hell theres even a git plugin to bypass obsidian sync, so you can get version controlled notes (which might be desirable in a work setting)
There is also the Obsidian Selfhosted Livesync community plugin that will sync with your own sync server. As the name suggests, it syncs live, so you can even see typing from one device appear on another. It's pretty neat
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It stores your data in plaintext, and simply uses the program to parse special formatting characters. There are no attempts at obfuscation or encryption, and it doesn’t lock you into a walled garden that refuses to play nice with other programs. The program itself is closed-source, but anyone could write an open source version to parse the same info… There just hasn’t been a good reason to do so. Even if Obsidian as a company and program ceases to exist overnight, your data is still safe on your machine and can be read by anyone who cares enough to dig into the file. Hell, you can even open it as the plaintext file and dig through it manually.
And the old version you have on the pc still works, since there is no cloud communication needed to run it.
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Saw this, super cool. Hope they make tons of money with Obsidian Sync
They do, because they don’t offer others easy sync options in the iOS app (only iCloud or Sync, no webDAV, no onedrive, no googledrive, etc. )
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This post was how I learned about Obsidian.
For those of you that love it, how do you use it daily?
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That's a bit naive imho. Remaining closed source is a form of IP protection and that's really ok for what Obsidian is (a markdown editor). There's just not any benefit for them other than appreciation from FOSS enthusiasts. Also maintaining an open source repository causes a higher workload and they lose a lot of freedom.
If privacy is your concern you don't need source code anyway. It's quite easy to sandbox an application like that and analyse network traffic and such. Also Obsidian is built using Electron. That means with enough motivation one could quite easily reverse engineer most of the app. Most of the applications behaviour can also be observed via the integrated dev console, which lets you view source code.
In short I don't really see the need, unless I want to build or maintain it myself. And I think the negatives far outweigh the positives from the perspective of Obsidians team.
You don't need a public repo to be FOSS. You don't need to accept changes. All you need is to provide a copy of the source code upon request. You can even automate that with a link to a tarball or something in the app.
My concern is less about privacy and more about security and longevity (i.e. what happens if they turn evil?). If it's FOSS, I can audit the source and fork it if they go in a direction I don't like. If it's proprietary, I'm SOL if they turn evil or stop development. Projects like these tend to die.
I don't really see any negatives here. The chance that someone makes a more popular fork is incredibly low, and the chance that someone audits it and points out a bug is a lot higher. They can retain control of the name, sell the software, etc. I really don't see how providing source code is a downside.
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It stores your data in plaintext, and simply uses the program to parse special formatting characters. There are no attempts at obfuscation or encryption, and it doesn’t lock you into a walled garden that refuses to play nice with other programs. The program itself is closed-source, but anyone could write an open source version to parse the same info… There just hasn’t been a good reason to do so. Even if Obsidian as a company and program ceases to exist overnight, your data is still safe on your machine and can be read by anyone who cares enough to dig into the file. Hell, you can even open it as the plaintext file and dig through it manually.
I just wish the price of having the publish feature was slightly lower. They’d get much more subscribers, including me.
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There is also the Obsidian Selfhosted Livesync community plugin that will sync with your own sync server. As the name suggests, it syncs live, so you can even see typing from one device appear on another. It's pretty neat
Huh, didn't see that one when I set up obsidian... I might check it out because syncthing does have some conflicting edit issues from time to time
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This post was how I learned about Obsidian.
For those of you that love it, how do you use it daily?
I truly is evolving with me. I'm no power user, but I've been using it for the last two years. Eh e I am at school it's where I take my classes notes. When I needed to write to myself it was also there. I have it synched between my two computers and my phone. And it is where I put my documents like CV's and Excels I share. It's not directly Obsidian doing all of this. But basically it becomes a Hub of all I do.
Recently I started saving more pages online that are important as notes in Obsidian and still find new usage of Obsidian
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They do, because they don’t offer others easy sync options in the iOS app (only iCloud or Sync, no webDAV, no onedrive, no googledrive, etc. )
You mean all the other methods that exist that can be implemented with ease? My friends have their notes on iCloud to sync, I amuse syncthing, others use GitHub. There is a lot of choice, they just offer an easy alternative way to do it
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Huh, didn't see that one when I set up obsidian... I might check it out because syncthing does have some conflicting edit issues from time to time
I will admit its a bit complicated to setup (mostly because the documentation could use some work) but it does work great once you have the sync server setup and your plugin configured
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It stores your data in plaintext, and simply uses the program to parse special formatting characters. There are no attempts at obfuscation or encryption, and it doesn’t lock you into a walled garden that refuses to play nice with other programs. The program itself is closed-source, but anyone could write an open source version to parse the same info… There just hasn’t been a good reason to do so. Even if Obsidian as a company and program ceases to exist overnight, your data is still safe on your machine and can be read by anyone who cares enough to dig into the file. Hell, you can even open it as the plaintext file and dig through it manually.
Markdown is also an open format. You aren't forced to use Obsidian for everything, and there are already numerous programs that are capable of displaying the formatted end-file, because it's standard markdown.
It's not some proprietary thing that only Obsidian uses.
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It's a very, very different approach having everything as a bullet point though.
This is true of Markdown though, no? Which Obsidian runs?
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This post was how I learned about Obsidian.
For those of you that love it, how do you use it daily?
it is fantastic for both lil notes and grand projects! and you can even link to those little notes and slowly evolve them into a grand projects
you can basically create a personalised Wikipedia! and Obsidian will help you with it, as it can detect when you write in plain text a word or phrase that also is another note's title, then you just click and bam, it's linked. And if you change a note's title, all mentions will update too!
you can also make conspiracy boards with the canvas note type, all usual formatting works within them
it's a great tool to keep a lot of information organised and linked together, without having to open a billion files and cross reference them (you can also open notes in split screen).
learning how to use it will only take an hour or so, and then you'll be zooming
i've recently been using it to collect and organise information for a big project i'm working on, and being able to link mentions of things to bigger topics and themes as i'm doing the data collection is just wonderful, no more "(IMPORTANT LOOK HERE!!!)"
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I've tried logseq for the last 6 months (no commercial license) at work, but while it's really good for outlining, it's lack of a tag function is what feels like a critical weakness to me. I realize structurally it's different in concept. But making everything into bullets doesn't always suit the task.
I would love Logseq for journalling or writing though.
Obsidian dev's original project Dynalist is an outline based notes app that does have tags. She doesn't update it anymore but I still rely heavily on it as my second brain.
