Well they'd just release it under a non-commercial license. The majority of their income comes from Obsidian Sync, and someone can't just host their own version of Obsidian Sync for all the Obsidian users for free. And there are already self-hosted alternatives to Obsidian Sync, in fact Obsidian even endorses them themselves[1].
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]
> So open sourcing would not harm any of those income streams.
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.
I really want to use Helix, it clicks with me so much more. But I do not want to learn how to use Helix for development. I want to be able to continue using VSCode. And last I checked, the VSCode extension was not very good. I also use Vim keybindings in Obsidian.
The moment VSCode and Obsidian support improves, I am switching immediately.
I switched from VSCode to Zed, which has a helix mode built-in and it works very well. For Obsidian, I use markdown-oxide with helix and just use the Obsidian app as a viewer. A helix-mode for Obsidian would be sooo nice.
Well that's one extra key press for every action. For example, you have to do `ved` to delete the current word instead of `de`. Whereas in Helix it's just `ed`.
Also visual mode doesn't work the same. If I want to delete up to the next word normally I do `dw`, but if I do `vwd` then I also delete the first letter of the next word. I guess in visual mode you'd have to do `vwhd` or `vawd`? Which is 4 keypresses instead of 2, which isn't great for something that I do all the time.
Going to just copy and paste rbren's comment from above:
> Some people seem to be convinced by logical reframings, like "if you jump into a woodchipper you die, but if 50% of people jump into the woodchipper they all survive"
> A logical reframing is not equivalent though! We know everyone else gets the same frame, and most of the problem is predicting what other people will do when presented with this particular two-button frame.
If you think that you can somehow get EVERYONE to press red... then surely you could get EVERYONE to vote blue. The outcome would be the same. And guess what... it's a lot easier to get 51% of people to vote blue than it is to get 100% of people to vote red.
Maybe if the US had a sane voting system, but they don't. I'm of the opinion that their flawed voting system is a huge factor in why the US government is the way it is.
If it automatically adds something to the history when you visit the page, then yes. If it only adds to the history when the user clicks something, then I would assume it would be fine. Hopefully.
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