Obsidian is one of the few closed-source applications I would consider relying on, due to their commitment to building around simple, open file formats.
Sure, they could screw me over and start charging absurd amounts of money for their app, but high quality open source alternatives would pop up immediately.
Meanwhile, as long as they don't screw me over, it's unlikely an open source alternative is going to be able to catch up to a profitable business that keeps their users happy.
It's an interesting approach, focused on incentive alignment, which is the best way to ensure quality long term.
I love Obsidian. I wish they would consider open sourcing the application. It doesn't even seem in conflict with their monetization plans, because they're already distributing the app for free, and making money with things like "Obsidian publish." They've got enough critical mass and a sufficiently thriving ecosystem of community plugins that they could only stand to benefit from open sourcing the core app.
See Mattermost for an example of a similarly positioned product that is fully open source.
The big gap I would love to be solved is a, preferably selfhosted, browser based view into my notes. That way I could access my notes from computers you can't or won't install obsidian on.
If it was open source that would be more likely to happen
I threw something together to address that goal. It was really hard to render obsidian-md into html that looked about the same. I started with general MD libs, then ultimately used obsidian-html. Obsidian's MD is not standard at all, though I'm not sure any MD is fully specified since there are so many edge cases.
Do you mean how your notes are connected, and organized? Otherwise, they are plain-text Markdown files. Any app that renders Markdown should be able to do it.
In-fact, I don’t really like Obsidian on Mobile, so I use iA-Writer to edit/view the Markdown files that I managed with Obsidian on the Desktop.
I completely agree. Even if they completely tank I can open my obsidian directory in a text editor or command line and still use it. I would still have access to features that are common in other apps like full text search or plain file sync. Attachments are just files in the filesystem that can be opened in any image viewer. Basically if i can’t use obsidian anymore i can still use my notebook and take notes without implementing or finding new software
Sure, they could screw me over and start charging absurd amounts of money for their app, but high quality open source alternatives would pop up immediately.
Meanwhile, as long as they don't screw me over, it's unlikely an open source alternative is going to be able to catch up to a profitable business that keeps their users happy.
It's an interesting approach, focused on incentive alignment, which is the best way to ensure quality long term.