Show HN: Opensidian

jshaqaw 2 hours ago |

I love open source. But Obsidian exists. Cloning existing apps to open source is almost push-button in the age of Claude. Obsidian makes a good product and frankly barely charges for it. Yes it's closed source but since all your files are markdown there is no lock-in risk. I guess I'd rather see people in open source make new things than copy existing products especially when those products are made by small scrappy indie companies. If everything gets cloned I don't see who has any incentive to try and innovate the next new thing in commercial markets and honestly I see too little evidence of innovation vs. cloning in the open source world.

dakiol 1 hour ago | |

> Yes it's closed source but since all your files are markdown there is no lock-in risk

Not true. The lock-in risk is the flow you get used to with Obsidian. If Obsidian disappears, I'm left with a bunch of MD files... so that's just like my file system, and if I needed just a file system to begin with, I wouldn't use Obsidian

V__ 1 hour ago | | |

However, Obsidian isn't a saas, it can't just disappear. As long as you have the installer you are fine.

weknowbetter 1 hour ago | |

I don't think this is a problem that's going to be solved by aligning everyone ethically.

Tomte 2 hours ago |

Why do you put a license on it when it‘s obviously not copyrightable?

14u2c 1 hour ago | |

Why do you think it's not copyrightable? It absolutely is under current US law. OP copied the interfaces, which is perfectly legal, and then defined their own implementations. Even if they are working with an LLM, that process of interactive prompting establishes authorship.

V__ 1 hour ago | | |

No, LLM output isn't copyrightable.

14u2c 28 minutes ago | | |

Did you interact with said output by reviewing it and hitting squash on the PR? Congratulations, it's now a derivative work.

Edit: I stand corrected. It does appear that this is a serious issue.

para_parolu 2 hours ago |

It’s always good to have alternatives but without plugins this is not really obsidian competitor (yet).

jpzk 2 hours ago |

UPDATE: added web version for testing https://opensidian.org/webversion/

jpzk 7 hours ago |

Open-source and non-profit under GPLv3, vault-compatible cross-platform markdown notes app. A drop in replacement that supports most of the functionality. It's based on Rust + Tauri v2. Build it yourself, fork it, or run signed prebuilts RPM, DEB, AppImage and Flatpak.

ramino 7 hours ago |

Long term Opsidian user here. This looks exciting. Especially the UI being so snappy. Do you also support the plugin system?

jpzk 7 hours ago | |

Great question, currently not, but should be done in a week or less.