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.
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.
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.
Perception of quality, because the author is under constant review.
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.
Just now, any regular user can clone the repository and ask an LLM to tune it to his needs.
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'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.
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 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.
In my experience, if the dev wishes to be compensated in dollars, they also sell a commercial license, cloud services, etc.
For the first time, I put a sponsorship button. Will see if it works.
That makes it easy for AI to be trained on it.
But in any case, this is also a nice project, but I guess I'm also an Obsidian evangelist.
That's why I will always hammer on open standards and federation.
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 :)
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.
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...
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
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.
or just vibe your own solution :)
> 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...
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.
- 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.
Also Zettlr
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.
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.
People use chatbot on the mobiles - way more convenient.
You can both read/write notes through the chat.
I've ended up still sticking with Trilium however as I like being able to have notes in multiple locations like this.
"TextBundle brings convenience back - by bundling the Markdown text and all referenced images into a single file."
But Local File System API has limited support in other browsers.
Simplicity started from the domain name.
A lot of us built knowledge bases, and we enjoyed it all quite a bit.
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.
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.
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.
"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!
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