I have been building a slightly different solution to the same problem. So far I’m pretty happy with the results and I have enough returning users that I think others are too (https://sdocs.dev/analytics).
I’ve built SmallDocs (https://sdocs.dev; Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777633).
SDocs is cli (`sdoc file.md`) -> instantly rendered Markdown file in the browser
When you install the cli it gives you the option to add a note in your base agent file (`~/.claude/CLAUDE.md`, etc.). This means every agent chat knows about SDocs and you can say “sdoc me the plan when you’re done with it” and the file will pop open instead of you having to find that terminal session to know it’s done.
Going browser first means you’re not required to install anything to get a great experience.
Despite being in the browser, the content of SDocs rendered Markdown files remain entirely local to you. SDoc urls contain your markdown document's content in compressed base64 in the url fragment (the bit after the `#`):
https://sdocs.dev/#md=GzcFAMT...(this is the contents of your document)...
The url fragment is never sent to the server (see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/URI/Reference/F...: "The fragment is not sent to the server when the URI is requested; it is processed by the client").
The sdocs.dev webapp is purely a client side decoding and rendering engine for the content stored in the url fragment.
This also means you can share your .md files privately by sharing the url.
I've enjoyed exploiting the HTML rendering side of things which is possible by displaying Markdown in a browser. I’ve added tagged code blocks that the agent is given documentation on how to use. Eg ```chart or ```mermaid (for mermaid diagrams). These then become interactive elements on the page (mermaid is best example of this currently). See live renderings of these options here - charts gallery: https://sdocs.dev/s/yO3WbxFf#k=arcDBnizla5n437VFAeiQcwlu8kh_..., diagrams gallery: https://sdocs.dev/s/B_Ux11DV#k=KsvheEkiBFai6acnoIJnrOdfVRS5u...
Thanks! I bought it about 3 years ago. Back then, the project was just a chatbot.
But already back then, I kind of had an idea where I want it all to go.
I wanted the simplicity (and 0 cognitive load!) to start right from the domain name! Files in .md - files.md!
> Re storing things on your server, what is the security layer around that?
For the most part I use the project from my Telegram bot. And due to that, it is not possible to do proper E2E.
Will see if people use the chatbot, if not, we can consider E2E.
This is hand crafted, for the most part.
"What a great use of my time building a competitor that adds no value, just to save a few dollars a month on sync and publishing. I hope other people value their time as little as I do and contribute"
Have fun!
So did I, 3 years later :)
(Note: The NextCloud integration is entirely optional, I've never used it. The front page makes it sound like a requirement.)
One thing I am missing though, is the ability to search globally throughout all the markdown files. I am pretty bad at organizing my thoughts, so often I find myself globally searching a word to figure out the file I need to navigate to.
This is something I really liked in Obsidian.
"TextBundle brings convenience back - by bundling the Markdown text and all referenced images into a single file."
Because Safari still doesn't support Local FileSystem API :(
I find the best thing to do when studying something is to go over your material, internalize and synthesize it in an essay. If you can't create an original essay which perfectly replicates the knowledge you want to understand then you almost certainly don't understand it perfectly.
Alternatively, create a detailed flow chart using subcharts if you have to. (Graphviz/dot is good for this)
I particularly like having a tg bots for observability, certain errors and certain events will get sent to a dedicated bot for my project. Highly recommend.
It looks and feels great, congratulations for getting this out.
I've been a huge fan of the fact that my backend sync infrastructure is my own self-hosted S3 bucket with local clients handling the presentation layer.
Who recommends Chrome? I don't.
I saw this bit of advice on twitter last week -- to use HTML as the target output for your LLM when you do planning or discussion sessions. And it's been very nice. It's so much easier to parse lots of info when it's presented in an organized/color-coordinated HTML file (potentially with some limited interactivity, and SVG drawings), rather than a block of markdown.
I now wonder if I should give my personal notes the same treatment. The only disadvantage HTML has relative to markdown is that HTML is harder to write and style. But you now have LLMs for that. And HTML/CSS/JS lets you customize your notes in whatever way you want. If you use HTML, any browser becomes your "note-viewing" app, and HTML is just as easy to store and move around as markdown, because it's just plain text.
As a layer of abstraction, it also creates more requirements: need a browser, likely need includes/cdn libs to avoid bloat, all sorts of other things. Markdown is consumable, diffable, shareable in raw form - and you can add enrichment layers on top without much effort.
Because I often dump text into md files and the operation is instant.
Same for small tweaks.
Definitely not easy to replicate Obsidian UX.
Interesting. Productivity tools should not force me getting creative to do the simplest things. Ideally, I can make it adapt to my workflow, not the other way around.
That line above is just an attempt to convince the user that the lack of features/extensibility is a positive thing.
Very good work.
I did a lot of experimentations with the UX/UI and colors, glad you appreciated the effort :)
- a tiny DSL for rendering anything custom, where every markdown renderer potentially introduces its own unique bit of syntax that's not transferable (example: frontmatter in Obsidian where you can put tags, that's not vanilla markdown)
- a note taking / viewing app, of which we now have dozens, where moving notes from one app to another creates friction, because of the custom "enrichment" layer each of those apps have (example: any popular plugin in Obsidian, where your notes are now littered with that plugin's tags)
HTML has this type of "enrichment" built-in.
Anyway, I am not trying to convince anyone. This is me working through this in my head. I have a large vault of Obsidian notes that I want to make more useful. And I figure, HTML is the standard-issue tool for producing beautiful-looking and functional text documents, so it's worth thinking about.
Claude Code is my “note taking app” these days and it does a great job organizing and linking my markdown notes together, and I just open the folder in Zed and render the markdown if I need it.
Local models will continue to improve, if your concern is privacy -- already they do a decent enough job at interacting with a well-schema'd PKM
I believe I put too much time into it during all those years, but I don't regret it. Because I use the project on daily basis.
>Do we really need this feature? Will it help us to do the real job, or does it just give dopamine?
Makes me think that requests for features generally will be turned down. So, No, thank you. Sometimes less is less.
or just vibe your own solution :)
A few years ago I played around with copying the Bear app interface for the web, the idea was to create a visually identical mockup of the app so you could immediately visualise changes made when customising various theme values. I stalled with the implementation of the last part, but the rest of it is up at bear.christippett.dev
[1] https://bear.app
Not under app.files.md? What do you think?
Check https://kraa.io/, you can write immediately even without login.
But Local File System API has limited support in other browsers.
I only really struggle with one basic feature - I want to be able to write note within 1-2 seconds of clicking the app icon. Obsidian makes it 10-15 seconds at best. The HelixNotes sometimes can get this in under 10, still looking for better options.
Now that I'm playing with it, I'm surprised it hasn't gotten more traction on HN or Reddit.
Simplicity started from the domain name.
A lot of us built knowledge bases, and we enjoyed it all quite a bit.
I can't live without it :)
Notes, journal, tasks, projects - everything is in there.
Whenever I have a new machine, first thing I do - I open the app =)
I'd like to hereby propose the "open shell" development model.
[caveat: it has been on my “to play with” list for a long time, but I haven't yet, so I may not know enough for my thoughts to be relevant!]
But in any case, this is also a nice project, but I guess I'm also an Obsidian evangelist.
Might as well open-source it (and perhaps get more people helping with the development), keep the Sync service, and stem competitor projects like these in the bud.
Please explain to me why developers should act like monks who've taken a vow of poverty? The devs built something valuable, they should profit from it.
AFAIK (as a long-term Obsidian daily user) Obsidian makes their money on various things attached to the editor/viewer itself, but don't actually charge for the editor/viewer. Even if they did, they could still slap a FOSS license on it, and continue charging for the parts they charge for today.
I'm guessing it's something else they're worried about though, rather than those things.
I agree with your very last part though, but I don't agree you cannot make it open source at the same time.
No, don't bully others into a fake argument about your weird fantasies.
They never said that developers should be poor. That's also incorrect. Please don't pull others into this kind of toxic discussions.
Perception of quality, because the author is under constant review.
I completely agree with the sentiment of your reply at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48181203 btw
It seems like software in AI-era should be distributed open source.
So that anyone could tweak it however he wants. Not though clunky plugins system.
That was true before the "AI era" as well.
That makes it easy for AI to be trained on it.
That's why I will always hammer on open standards and federation.
All my files are just vanilla text files. All the folders are just vanilla folders. All the attachments are just vanilla attachments. If Obsidian pissed me off, then I'd still have my notes in a fairly accessible format.
Still need to render widget tables, lists and syntax highlighting for code blocks for a basic modern notepad, i'm not sure about open sourcing it, seems like a waste of time nowadays but it'll be free to use.
[0]: https://i.imgur.com/ro9Zq9w.png [1]: https://i.imgur.com/pbJcTQF.gif
When I read "an alternative", I assumed feature-parity and API compatibility. But what I found out was entirely different and much more interesting.
I'll give it a try, thanks for sharing your year-old work!
Thanks for a good observation! Indeed, I don't position it as Obsidian alternative. I don't know a better pitch for it just yet.
For me that's something about: simplicity, lazy flow of adding things, readiness to use out of the box.
To focus on what works, and not what is fancy.
When I read “alternative” I immediately had a rant in my head about people calling things alternatives that are not.
The 2GB free quota on Dropbox is plenty enough for text (and some screenshots). Or you could self-host obviously. Git while lovely for source code is a hassle for notes.
And if you want always direct edit access and do it often why not then a simple plain text since either way you will be dependent on the software if you like the additional features it offers which aren't inside .md like linking and other
I use git and it works well and gives me security my notes will not dissapear.
On mobile used to be more difficult so I used specialized app before but now Obsidian git works well enough.
It can be better but overall it works well enough for me. I would dictate things to my phone in daily note and later process those more in desktop.
There is no better interface for text than a terminal, and we are in the golden age. Despite being extremely powerful, this setup will run on resource constrained machines.
“Second brain grows, but first brain doesn’t get smarter.”
Something I remember Tiago Forte said, which turned me off of his partículas brand of a second brain, is that his goal is to “remember nothing”, and have the second brain surface exactly the context necessary at the moment, which he would proceed to read and ingest.
That sounds terrible to me :) it’s like “we don’t need to remember things if we can google them”.
I much prefer this author’s vision of using the second brain to strengthen the first brain.
It's a bit strange to me that in 2026 where code is allegedly "free" we're still building these web apps that pretend to be desktop apps. In part I understand it, and logically a PWA must be better than electron for the most part (takes up less space, doesn't install another browser on my computer) yet I cannot see myself installing a PWA on my Mac. I feel like in general I've come to the point in my life where if a desktop app is not native I am not installing it (apps that I NEED to have for one reason or another are excluded, but I'll still grunt)
Their "PWA" marketing holds them back in addition to financial incentives of Apple and Google. Most people aren't familiar with term "PWA" also why is "installing" a feature who wants to manage these things through their OS which a lot of normies already find confusing. People want plug and play the whole benefit of pwa (seperate window etc) could basically be exposed as per origin setting inside the browser itself and if user want they can pin it to their desktop. Since in my own testing there isn't much difference it terms of API's exposed only lack thereof like no proper user controlled storage retention settings for apis like OPFS and also lack of syncing directly to a user specified folder across all browsers. If they improve these files workflows you will see a lot more robust web apps.
I've ended up still sticking with Trilium however as I like being able to have notes in multiple locations like this.
So that your files and tools can grow together, fully under your ownership, through the ages.
The app can be easily tweaked for your own needs via an LLM - code is optimized for that.
P.S. And Golang seems to be great fit for this kind of software.
docker + php-fpm + php7 + larvel + nginx + redis + cron + worker + certbot
Server after the rewrite to Golang:
server, a 15MB no-dependencies binary that has everything.
Like, I should be able to open it even after a few years, and do some fixes or add some features.
Go's ecosystem seems to share this mindset.
Just open web/index.html file, it absolutely requires no server.
If you want a local server though, it is easy to setup: https://github.com/zakirullin/files.md/blob/main/docs/your-o...
Not going to be open source or free though, with 2 year perpetual license. I wonder how much that would interest you? My target is people who wants todo.txt like simplicity, but few useful bits. Only for Linux and Windows for now.
My take: you probably don't need so much metadata!
I've spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to figure out the perfect knowledge management app for me and honestly, I'm pretty sure I will get a lot of mileage out of something you just throw pages into, search to find it again, and ask AI to summarize/consolidate when you need it again.
I found this to be similar to my own opinion. So, what tools are you currently using? I'm interested to hear about it.
We had those already more than a decade ago. Personally, I fondly remember Mou.
Obsidian has heavy Electron vibes, and Files.md is several steps more into the wrong direction.
The name is also bad. It feels like it was chosen because someone already had the domain.
- self hosted
- works offline (mostly)
- "just md" BUT
- scriptable or extendable by lua, rendered in page, eg `${1 + 1}` outputs `2`, but you can do a lot more, such as query pages and tags with a LINQ type query interface.
I tried moving to Obsidian Notes and found myself missing Trillium. It's nice to be able to just open the web browser and have access to your own self-hosted notes with an editor anywhere. You also can set it up so if you add a sharing tag to a note you can easily share a link to the note. I believe Obsidian allows similar but only if you pay, and it's also not self-hosted.
I've tried a wiki style approach before like Tiddlywiki, but I feel like it is a whole different concept of taking and making notes that often is a bit more cumbersome, but maybe it works better with how some people think.
While OSS is nice, in theory it allows vibe-coding personalizations, without a clear plugin standard then every update would cause a merge headache.
And there is no lack of text editors.
The first real Obsidian alternative would allow use of existing Obsidian plugins. And I think this one thing could really make an alternative gain traction, with both users and those who contribute to the plugin ecosystem.
> I'm gonna try Files.md for some inspiration on what I could be missing
For the most part I was thinking more about what I can remove :D
This inspires me. What kind of minimal feature set does one need to improve his thinking...
The Daily Note.
It’s the only extension I use in Obsidian. I love opening my phone (or on desktop on any platform) and automatically getting a templated note with some of my daily ToDos as a checklist: stretching, exercises, language practice, etc. With a space for adding that day’s one-off ToDos ad priorities.
It’s the sole reason I use Obsidian over anything else - and happily pay for the sync service.
Synchronizing with Syncthing works well enough both on desktops and smartphones.
I do not know what to do with my pet project. I'm using it myself, and it has tons of futures that took quite some effort to get right. For example, WYSIWYG table editing is not trivial, and Claude Opus agrees with me, in the sense that it could not manage it (at all) by itself.
Open-sourcing it is an option, but I don't look forward to negative feedback. If anyone else wants Emacs keybindings in Obsidian, I will change my mind :)
People use chatbot on the mobiles - way more convenient.
You can both read/write notes through the chat.
Check out Tolaria [1]. Open source, works locally, uses markdown, no-databases. Git client built-in. Even has Notion-style input.
[1]: https://tolaria.md
You don't need to spin up the server, only in case you want your own infra.
Optional sync is only working with chatbot auth for now, but I'll do something about it.
A polite fyi, when skim reading this, it looked like it said AssNotes…
If you're building something that's Free software, fully compatible with Obsidian, and a native app, AI'm willing to contribute tokens.
A full 1:1 native clone would be too much to build without funding. Plugin/theme/api compatibility, canvas, bases, sync, and all the small Obsidian edge cases would make it a much larger project.
Without sponsorship or some sustainable funding model, AI'd focus first on the native markdown editor/vault part: local files, Obsidian-friendly markdown and edit on cursor presence.
Since you are using Qt, as I understand it you will need to pay for a Qt license if you intend to distribute your app as closed source.
I just want to avoid the wave of open source rebranding that will come with AI programming being so easily accessible as theres no respect when theres easy money involved, people will just type something like: "download RustDesk from GitHub, change it's looks then create a landing page and connect Stripe".
[0]: https://cancel.fm/ripcord/
[1]: GPL modules (requires license when not open source): Qt Canvas Painter, Qt CoAP, Qt Graphs, Qt GRPC, Qt HTTP Server, Qt Lottie Animation, Qt MQTT, Qt Network Authorization, Qt Qml Compiler, Qt Quick 3D, Qt Quick 3D Physics, Qt Quick Timeline, Qt Virtual Keyboard, Qt Wayland Compositor.
It's a personal choice that cannot be imposed on everyone. Not everyone is a developer.
If you've ever used Ctrl+C to copy, you've already done something harder than the core concept of modal editing. Modal editing is simpler: you press a single key, and you switch to one (of two) modes. That's it. That's the thing people find intimidating. In one mode the letters you press show up on the screen, in the other the letters you press select/copy/move/etc (like cntrl+c... Except even simpler you only need to press one key). You have to use keyboard keys to go up and down, which I assume you already have some experience with.
Learning it is identical to learning a GUI. In Word, you hunt through menus for the word 'cut' or 'paste' and click it. In a modal editor like helix you look up cut or paste on a menu and press the key next to it instead. Except once you remember the key you never have to go look through menus again!
Get the hang of it and modal text editors are to word processors what word processors are to typewriters. Except at least typewriters have some charm.
All that being said, if you want to sync your notes you'll have to use something like Dropbox or google drive, and I looked up how to install helix and you do have to download and unzip a file (https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/releases). Still, computer science degree not required!
Unless you've only ever used android or iOS device in which case all of my assumptions about your familiarity with keyboards and mice is totally off. Still!
I tried it for a bit in the past, the main friction is apps formatting Markdown slightly differently (indents, blank lines).
But we also can't remember nothing and just dump _everything_ into the second brain, otherwise we'd have no map, no context, no way to even know how to look for what we need in the moment. It would be like taking a random teenager off the street, handing them an electronics engineering textbook, and asking them to build a power supply on the spot.
So there is definitely a spectrum. Everyone seems to disagree on the optimal point on the spectrum and that is almost certainly because it varies greatly from person to person.
My personal experience has been that simply writing extremely detailed notes in the first place makes the information "sticky" in my brain, and greatly increases the likelihood that I won't even _need_ to directly reference the notes in the future. Fun little catch-22 there.
Yet it's possible to remember a lot. Those who pass "The Knowledge" test are truly inspirational. See this 60 Minutes report on London's Black Cab drivers [0]
[0]: https://60minutestonight.com/the-knowledge-60-minutes-report...
I've been growing my knowledge base for many years, with great results.
And you really need all that much to start taking notes.
No techniques, no workflows, just the the simplest setup would do.
"Second Brain", however, brings excitement to people's minds.
But in reality it just doesn't work. It makes great sales, though.
Agreed, but in the case of Obsidian, since the way they manage the data, they cannot just "take it away from us", it'll always sit where you leave it, as it's not a SaaS or a remote service. And even if the desktop client went away, all your data and notes are still available.
Otherwise I generally agree with you, all my professional and personal tooling shouldn't be able to take away agency from me, but it's worth separate the tooling from the data, as loosing the tooling sucks but loosing the data is a lot worse, at least they cannot do that.
The boringly simple knowledge base.
That was a long journey for me :)
Good luck with your project as well.
My notes were _already_ a folder of markdown, so I pretty seamlessly moved from VS Code as my notes app to obsidian and could move back to a text editor if obsidian turns evil. This might be part of why I’m less enthusiastic about their canvas thing, but then I was never a mind map or scrap board person anyway.
One instance for the base editor, and one instance for the currently active cell. The other cells are rendered to HTML through a different code path (no CodeMirror involved there).
For rendering mathematical formulas it uses MathJax.
A global context-based keyboard handler such as the one in VSCode allows for Emacs key bindings.
So the core ethos of it is: 1. ephemeral AND safe - easy to jot notes but also safe from crash or accidental closing ( all text buffers persist a rewindable history), 2. performance, 3. minimalism: I don't want a whole plugin ecosystem or bloat. extra features are all accessed via the command palette, 4. markdown WYSIWYG rendering tailored to my liking
Technical details: Native markdown notes editor for Windows, written in Rust. No GUI library as I went straight to raw Win32 with DirectWrite/Direct2D/D3D11 underneath. No winit, no wgpu, no async. Just a real wndproc and threads talking over crossbeam channels. The rope is canonical and there's a separate "display map" layer that handles wrapping, folding, hide/replace projections.
source bytes never touch the GPU and every text layout is built from a display string with styles baked in. SQLite is the source of truth and the files on disk are exports, so every keystroke is durable
Performance is the whole point as I wanted sublime-level performance(and beyond) There are gated budgets in CI for every slice, eg. keystroke to pixel under 8ms p99, decoration parse under 1ms, D2D submission under 2ms, edit-to-durable under 400ms, plus a variance-tail contract (p99.9 ≤ 2× p99) so sporadic stalls fail the build too. Steady-state target is zero new heap allocations per keystroke. Layout caches are keyed so they survive typing bursts, the display map has splice + motion-reuse caches that killed O(document) rebuilds on single-character edits and caret moves, and every reflow funnels through a helper that pins the caret's screen-y so font/wrap/resize changes never make you re-find your cursor.
I've also done a bit of research on the psychology of perception and response times to try to tune this for maximum intuitiveness and responsiveness. Too fast is disconcerting, too slow is infuriating, too little feedback is confusing, too much is distractinc, etc.
this has taken about a week so far and it's almost ready to replace my usage of sublime
If you do use their sync service, it's end to end encrypted with your own local-only password, so Obsidian doesn't have a backdoor to your encrypted remote files either.
If you don't trust Obsidian's sync service, but want to sync files, you can sync your files in any other way you choose, like with git or webdav. You can keep it all self-hosted if you want to.
You could encryt your entire local vault too if you want to.
Obsidian's business model is just selling the sync subscription service. There's no ads component to incentivize data collection/tracking and pissing off their entire customer base.
So I can't find it in me to be worried about this one.
And if Obsidian did go rogue one day, the files are basically exported already, so whatever, it'd be easy to switch to something else.
I think the open-source obsidian plugins that aren't yet popular enough to have a lot of eyes actually checking over the source code yet are more suspect than Obsidian itself. Open-source on its own doesn't always actually prevent malicious actions or privacy violation, since most people just treat "open-source" as "this app is automatically trustworthy because surely someone else is keeping on eye on it" and either don't know how or don't bother to look at the source code themselves. But I'm not actually worried about that, either.
I think the parent's point is that Obsidian could add any tracking they wanted and -- unless you're examining their TOS or your network closely -- you might never know. However:
> Obsidian's business model is just selling the sync subscription service. There's no ads component to incentivize data collection/tracking and pissing off their entire customer base.
And that to me seems deeply infused into Obsidian's entire culture. They built a community and they're not gonna mess that up. And like you say, if they do it's trivial to move one's markdown somewhere else.
Also if you don't need certbot anymore is your service managing its own ssl certs with letsencrypt? Isn't it generally easier to configure with a reverse proxy like nginx or caddy and terminate SSL at the edge? That's literally caddy's whole thing that it does SSL for you so that it doesn't concern your application.
"Source available": you can look at source code, maybe run a modified version internally.
"Open source": you can integrate it into your own software, republish, etc.
https://community.obsidian.md/search?type=plugin&categories=...
But those are plugins and aren't as easy to use as the integrated sync. Obsidian wants to have their sync to be the easiest to use, and the easiest to discover.
If they went FOSS anyone could just create a rebranded fork that includes their sync instead of Obsidian's sync. Even GPL wouldn't stop that, if the competitor would just keeps their product open source too.
And honestly, they've been very good stewards of the project thus far, I'm happy with the status quo.
The whole data structure is designed to make this easy.
I chose Syncthing for this purpose, and it is free and works flawlessly. You can even trivially disable their native sync, as it comes as an internal extension.
Mozilla could have avoided so much drama with Pocket, VPN, AI features, etc., if they just were as transparent and liberal with critical first-party services as Obsidian is.
The mechanism that allowed that was patched as a vulnerability
- "We have nothing to hide";
- "We are willing to take you to court for taking advantage of our trust".
- Matthew McConnAIhey
Wasting 300mb ram to show static text, Wordpad does the same in 13mb ram but sadly it lacks markdown support.
What you just described is discoverability. Something that terminal applications and modal editors tend to do quite poorly.
Just now, any regular user can clone the repository and ask an LLM to tune it to his needs.
It was mostly crafted by hand.
Let's say, I've saved some "complexity space" for LLM to add features on top.
In other words, the project has dumb-simple code right now, and it is ready to hold some amount of "tech-debt" from an LLM.
That's the point of open source, sharing the knowledge.
We'll all make the same shit over and over if noone shares.
But if we all share, then the only thing left to make is the unknown.
Sharing is always better.
There's no value to their business to open sourcing the product. Open source risks losing customers to knock-off competitors or fragmenting their plugin ecoystem (which is a lot of Obsidians moat).
I think exactly the same as you, but that doesn't give me the myopic view of "either you do open source or you get rich"
> There's no value to their business to open sourcing the product. Open source risks losing customers to knock-off competitors or fragmenting their plugin ecoystem (which is a lot of Obsidians moat).
You know this because you spent a whole of two minutes thinking about it?
It'd make a different bet, that Obsidian is popular today, but if they went FOSS, they'd become ubiquitous. Probably some copy-pasted competitors would appear as quickly as they'd disappear, because they're not Team Obsidian, and obviously don't know as much as Obsidian does.
But anyways, this is all speculation, I don't know for sure what would happen either, but at least I'm humble enough to know I don't know.
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).
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...
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.
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.
No consideration given that lots of people contribute voluntarily to open-source projects or even release their projects/code for free because they enjoy writing code and engaging with the broader open source or free software community.
Every line of code that adds value should have some of that value should GO BACK INTO THE PROJECT.
I'm against the idea a successful product should be open source, even when you have full conrol of your data and they only charge for convenience.
Its an assinine philosophy that makes for WORSE products. Your projects would do better with revenue. More time, better marketing, other people to help.
Octave developer gave up after 25 years[0]. Instead of a robust competitor with a full team of people working on it and generational wealth for the value he created, he gave up struggling to pay bills.
It's also the case that most open source projects just simply do not provide the value that their authors think they do. Think of all the paintings, books, and music ever written. Not the ones you've seen, I mean ALL the ones ever created by any human anywhere. Only a small percentage of what is actually produced ends up being good enough for people to talk about and/or pay actual money for. Software is no different. (And is in fact almost certainly much worse.)
I never want to be paid for writing code, that would take all the fun out of it. But I wish you all the best!
Simple utility stuff I believe should fit in this category. Things like a text editor.
The profit comes from elsewhere, larger more complex systems.
Of course someone can TRY to profit off a text editor, but unless it solves complex enough problems (like a full blown IDE, but even then...).
The issue is there is intense demand for it, and ALSO easy supply. If someone attempts a profit driving rugpull, another will pop up in it's place.
I am still using Dendron because it meets my needs, but I'm always half tempted to replace it, and I'm fairly confident I could come up with something that meets my own needs in a day or two, and it would likely also be valuable to countless others. I just keep assuming that someone else will spend that day or two, and my pain points with Dendron are not that bad for me to spend the time.
Most text-editors by large corporations don't even pass this bar.
I do think there is room for a few good paid text editors in the world, but most people won't pay directly for them, though they might use them if they are bundled ala Google Docs / O365 Word.
I am not a power user for Dendron, I mostly just use it for journaling, keeping track of who is who and what is what, and organizing architecture / ideas before they find a home somewhere else. Mostly a journal.
I do like that it’s in VS Code and I can leverage those tools and now, AI, to help.
The main functionality I use is the new daily journal from template feature. Do you use more surface area from it? What is the most useful features for you?
The subscription based platform with automatic cloud hosting and other quality of life features, whatever those are depending on the app.
Although there's a bunch of 100% open source projects and developers that get enough donations to make it their full time job just off of that. Not that it's the way to go if you want to get rich, but it's still very much a real thing.
I'm not saying you have to, but you asked how they get compensated and there's nothing stopping you from giving them money.
It's easy to forget that you get a lot of value out of something and not give back. If you end up getting a good paying job with your programming experience just buy your favorite projects "a beer" one a month, or once a year. God knows it's better spent there all the subscriptions we have like Netflix or Spotify. Cheaper too.
Also, if the projects are big enough you can usually get tax credit. If you work at a decently sized company they also usually do some charity matching.
Most people won't pay for something if they don't have to.
> Most people won't pay for something if they don't have to.
It doesn't work because people that make $100k+ salaries wont buy their "friend" a beer. It's not failing because a bunch of poor people don't donate.
And it is viable because many things already operate this way. The most profitable ones have just convinced companies to donate. That shouldn't be required, but I'm not ignoring the reality.
Besides, this is a reality that is solvable simply by a small percentage of people going "you know what? I will donate". Not "everybody", just a very very small proportion. Let's take ripgrep as an example. Who knows how many people use this, but there's over 64k stars. Let's say 1% donate $5/mo. That's $3.2k/mo for burntsushi, I'm pretty sure he'd be happy with that. He's also a prolific HN user so maybe he'll even respond.
My point is that all it takes is a mental shift from a small number of people. This isn't some "we need huge collaboration therefore it'll never happen" type of thing, this is "I can take action and have meaningful impact today" type of thing.
For the first time, I put a sponsorship button. Will see if it works.
In my experience, if the dev wishes to be compensated in dollars, they also sell a commercial license, cloud services, etc.
I have a problem, I spend a few days building a tool that solves the problem, it works pretty well for me, and I release it to let others get value from it. They make tweaks to it, perhaps improve it, and I get value from those enhancements and bugfixes.
They have lots of sponsors [1]; you can pay $4/month for sync service or $50 a year, per person for a commercial license.
Free as in beer and free as in speech means those ‘contributors’ are also free as in Linus to go fork themselves.
Don’t like it? Go fork, yourself. Want it different? Pay, money, make, it, happen. Don’t like paying? Go fork, yourself, harder.
no because the people who maintain the nuts and bolts of the open source world, like the often individual or handful contributors to projects like ffmpeg or xz-utils have been passionately doing that and at times burning out (which in case of the latter caused pretty prominent problems).
Does the world look to you like it's in a state where important questions and problems don't go unanswered? The reason this stuff works is because there's random guys in a basement in Kentucky somewhere who thanklessly work their asses off and nobody cares. They simply keep doing it because half of the internet would fall apart otherwise.
Now you have the answer.
Always good to promote these apparent small wins in case the catch on. Do suspect the shift to make, instead of hoping our psychology changes en masse:
Change the model to one of the freebie models that works for high-income earners. High-income earners are OK to make purchases of tangible things where they're promised good is done for the world. Then they enjoy their music and wine (at the gala), or tote bag or whatnot.
We gonna be invited to the first Text Editor Gala?! Maybe not. 50/50 raffle supporting a text editor dev, though, maybe... (ugh a little gambley)
tl;dr give the self-wealth-protecting psychology of the wealthy an out to help them justify their good deed, like NPR sponsor gifts
(to execute - cut some deals with concert venues, restaurants, handmade good purveyors... obtain discounts... then work with developers to set up bespoke relevant rewards for given donation tiers. first part of this plan could be a decent task for the non-developers who wanna contribute to OSS)
I also paid for a few more, e.g. Notion, but I think it's better to focus on: There's definitely value in good text editors.
They can greatly enhance your experience with a system, e.g. if Samsung Notes was amazing I'd be much more likely to stick to using a Samsung phone.
That last category of people are also now likely to go create something themselves with AI, but don't really want to or can't start a business from it, so they may add it to the pile of free software others can use.
Not everyone HAS to profit from their work, though I do think those who make it their passion might benefit from finding a way to do that.
Btw, my comment was intended to append yours, not counter or argue. Sorry if it came off that way