A bit of exciting news. I'm joining Obsidian full-time as CEO! ✨
I have been using Obsidian and developing for it since Erica Xu and Shida Li first launched in 2020. I can't overstate how life-changing Obsidian has been for me. It has fundamentally improved the way I think. I want to see what happens if more people gain that superpower.
I've spent about 20 years building things online, and learned a lot along the way. Obsidian is built on strong values. My goal is to create the structure that helps us uphold those values for as long as possible.
Obsidian is
- Free for personal use
- Built on durable, open file formats without lock-in
- Private, offline-first, and E2E encrypted
- Endlessly customizable via API/plugins
Above all, Obsidian is 100% user-supported. There are no investors pushing us to compromise on these values.
I believe these strong values are why Obsidian has such a kind and dedicated community. It's genuinely one of the most generous and friendly places online.
If it is user supported, why is it closed-source?
@post those two things are not mutually exclusive — for example Logseq is open source but is not 100% user supported (they have raised a lot of money from VC investors)
you can read more about the reasoning here
https://forum.obsidian.md/t/open-sourcing-of-obsidian/1515/11
https://forum.obsidian.md/t/open-sourcing-of-obsidian/1515/38
Sorry but you are making a lot of assumptions. Can we stick strictly to my question?
I'm not asking why Obsidian is not developed in the open, accepting contributions etc etc (addressed in your link).
I'm asking why you don't publish Obsidian source code with a FOSS license attached. Even a zip file for every release would qualify it as FOSS, what matters is the license.
You can release it with a GPL license and whoever makes changes and redistribute it would be forced to release it with GPL. This means you can pick the changes and merging them back to Obsidian is you found those valuable.
Maybe the original Obsidian developers only knew about permissive FOSS licenses and not the Copyleft ones like GPL?
