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.
> 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
People who care and don't want Obsidian to disappear should support them, not destroy them. They are providing fair price product.
This is an example of why I don't think we're getting anywhere near an age of abundance with AI: we're using the power we've gained in a reductive way.
I legitimately don't understand this sentiment. If cloning software is really as easy as you say it is nowadays, the only difference between our own agent stack, the small scrappy indie devs, and commercial software companies, is who pays for the tokens.
Assuming this, I see even LESS of a reason NOT to have a wide array of open versions we can all hack our way from. We'll collectively have to invest less if we have an open base to work from. Reinventing the wheel doesn't stop being reinventing the wheel because an LLM did it.
Obsidian isn’t hard to code. That was never the barrier. The barrier was that the creators took a risk and made something new with their design choices. LLMs (at least today) can clone and mash-up but they don’t make new choices. Open source as a whole is a lot better at copying than creating. Happy to be corrected but all the major user apps I know of are clones of commercial products.
sort of. It does a lot less than Roam, etc., which is good because Roam is complicated. In my experience the simple model of obsidian is just right, and the implementation is excellent.
I know people hate it when I draw a comparison between crypto/NFTs and AI since the latter has some utility, but it really is crazy just how similar the vibes are, and you can see this in this recent fad of people trying to clone existing software with AI.
In case anyone has a fuzzy memory, back during peak NFT hype grifters would take art made by other artists and attempt to tokenize it as NFTs without the consent of the original artist, or otherwise possibly copy said artist's work and make a collection of it.
It was disgusting and parasitic then and it's disgusting and parasitic now.
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.
This hasn't yet been decided, as I pointed out above. The courts have indicated that push button LLM output is not copyrightable, but haven't said anything about larger orchestrations of multiple agents operating over hours or days to produce something with direction from a human.
Given that photographs are copyrightable, I wouldn't hold my breath on projects like this being deemed ineligible for copyright.
> In the copyright law in the United States, such copyright may exist when the materials in the compilation (or "collective work") are selected, coordinated, or arranged creatively such that a new work is produced. Copyright does not exist when content is compiled without creativity, such as in the production of a telephone directory. In the case of compilation copyright, the compiler does not receive copyright in the underlying material, but only in the selection, coordination, or arrangement of that material.
All my experience seeing orgs ship real production code with the assistance of AI over months/many-thousands-of-commits shows that the skill not only lies in what context you choose to provide in the first place (product and technical specifications, design guidelines, prompting process with the model(s)), but also in how to effectively review and test all of it, which is still done with human direction throughout. This is why people with no experience in coding can't do with AI what an industry veteran with 20 years shipping to production can.
In any case, I think existing reading of copyright law will be sufficient to say that large AI-driven software projects are a process of orchestration and also of curation in selecting what actually gets committed (or, if commit-by-default is enabled, then what to revert). This may not always be true in the future, though, as capabilities increase...one part of me thinks you could just do random stuff like "Make me an excel except every cell is a powerpoint presentation" and a good enough AI would reason through and produce something without further input. But I think in most cases, folks have a real set of requirements in mind, and get all of them into the AI through a process of iteration in various ways. I think that's real work that requires skill and, in many cases, creativity, at least in the sense that someone else walking up to the same tool and prompting on their own would produce a very different output than you'd see if you asked the same person to retry the same project.
I don't think we disagree that much. But the repo in question had basically no human input, at least no substantial one. It will be interesting where the courts will decide the boundary lies though.
Copyright of aggregated and curated LLM output has not been decided upon, but other curation precedents suggest it is going to be copyrightable, similar to how curated collections of facts are copyrightable, even though facts themselves are not.
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.
1. Multimedia. I have a cookbook with photos and videos in my Obsidian, as well as songbooks with musical notation that renders properly.
2. Databases. e.g. for an international vacation I created the itinerary as a "Base" (structured database) that rendered out to a calendar and day-by-day pages. This even included floating itinerary items like "eat X kind of cuisine" to squeeze in on any day, shopping lists for gifts to bring back, as well as all train routes, flight numbers, hotel/ticket confirmation numbers and the like. Then on each day I could journal what we did and see what we still had to do. I was able to share these with everyone on the trip and make sure everyone got to experience their must-see items.
3. You can argue all of the above would also work as a website. But Obsidian makes this work across my phones and tablets too, in a way that I can edit from mobile whenever I need to jot down a quick edit. That's the killer feature.
Exactly this. I've tried hacking together a syncing solution on both Android and iOS, from Syncthing, to Git via Termux (Android) or Working Copy (iOS). I didn't try NextCloud or Dropbox etc, but that Obsidian Just Works(tm) as smoothly as Apple Notes (but is available as a full-featured desktop app in Linux -- I know Apple Notes has a - slightly janky - web interface)... I was happy to pay for the sync and stop worrying about checking on my sync status or remembering to push my commits.
Plus the hotbar on mobile makes it easy to do bullets/checkboxes, as easy as typing on my computer keyboard.
Formatting, syncing, and organization but yeah the benefits are too small for many people including me. I just use vscode.
However, enough people find those things valuable enough that Obsidian has millions of paying users.
I don't think software really need to penetrate more than 1% of the market to be profitable. If Obsidian penetrated even 10% of the market, they would have been worth >$30B lol.
>Has it become a trend to pick up some proprietary software and vibecode a replacement for it and then slap a FOSS license on it?
Very much, yes. It started niche, and then notable sloppified projects made the normie news (Artcraft, sloppified Adobe software stack) and Sony's "you will own nothing" stance made people target the PS5 and popular titles that are now popular decompilation and emulation projects.
After that made the rounds, it seems everyone has gone full tilt on remaking existing products, but worse (there are some that are decent, but this does not look like one of them)
It's cool and interesting, but I can't help but feel we're about the enter an entirely new era of anti-consumer lobbying leading to new legislation that will be an absolute bloodbath for these projects, all while making individual consumer rights even worse.
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.
> 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
People who care and don't want Obsidian to disappear should support them, not destroy them. They are providing fair price product.
This is an example of why I don't think we're getting anywhere near an age of abundance with AI: we're using the power we've gained in a reductive way.
However, Obsidian isn't a saas, it can't just disappear. As long as you have the installer you are fine.
I legitimately don't understand this sentiment. If cloning software is really as easy as you say it is nowadays, the only difference between our own agent stack, the small scrappy indie devs, and commercial software companies, is who pays for the tokens.
Assuming this, I see even LESS of a reason NOT to have a wide array of open versions we can all hack our way from. We'll collectively have to invest less if we have an open base to work from. Reinventing the wheel doesn't stop being reinventing the wheel because an LLM did it.
Obsidian isn’t hard to code. That was never the barrier. The barrier was that the creators took a risk and made something new with their design choices. LLMs (at least today) can clone and mash-up but they don’t make new choices. Open source as a whole is a lot better at copying than creating. Happy to be corrected but all the major user apps I know of are clones of commercial products.
Eh obsidian commandeered the idea from roam who commandeered the idea from org-mode etc.
sort of. It does a lot less than Roam, etc., which is good because Roam is complicated. In my experience the simple model of obsidian is just right, and the implementation is excellent.
There are no new programs to make. https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-project-of-software...
I know people hate it when I draw a comparison between crypto/NFTs and AI since the latter has some utility, but it really is crazy just how similar the vibes are, and you can see this in this recent fad of people trying to clone existing software with AI.
In case anyone has a fuzzy memory, back during peak NFT hype grifters would take art made by other artists and attempt to tokenize it as NFTs without the consent of the original artist, or otherwise possibly copy said artist's work and make a collection of it.
It was disgusting and parasitic then and it's disgusting and parasitic now.
I don't think this is a problem that's going to be solved by aligning everyone ethically.
I liked when it happened to Adobe, but I don't like this.
Not sure why we need a copy to be honest. You also pay for maintenance, updates, integration, etc. It is impressive as a project though.
Why do you put a license on it when it‘s obviously not copyrightable?
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.
No, LLM output isn't copyrightable.
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.
This hasn't yet been decided, as I pointed out above. The courts have indicated that push button LLM output is not copyrightable, but haven't said anything about larger orchestrations of multiple agents operating over hours or days to produce something with direction from a human.
Given that photographs are copyrightable, I wouldn't hold my breath on projects like this being deemed ineligible for copyright.
This project has zero chance of being eligible for copyright:
> Nearly all of the code, the design docs, and this README were written by Claude
The only way courts will deem LLM output to be copyrightable is if there is substantial human input. Just orchestrating agents won't be enough.
We disagree.
Copyright in compilation would be sufficient alone, requiring no new laws, to my reading. In particular:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_in_compilation
> In the copyright law in the United States, such copyright may exist when the materials in the compilation (or "collective work") are selected, coordinated, or arranged creatively such that a new work is produced. Copyright does not exist when content is compiled without creativity, such as in the production of a telephone directory. In the case of compilation copyright, the compiler does not receive copyright in the underlying material, but only in the selection, coordination, or arrangement of that material.
All my experience seeing orgs ship real production code with the assistance of AI over months/many-thousands-of-commits shows that the skill not only lies in what context you choose to provide in the first place (product and technical specifications, design guidelines, prompting process with the model(s)), but also in how to effectively review and test all of it, which is still done with human direction throughout. This is why people with no experience in coding can't do with AI what an industry veteran with 20 years shipping to production can.
In any case, I think existing reading of copyright law will be sufficient to say that large AI-driven software projects are a process of orchestration and also of curation in selecting what actually gets committed (or, if commit-by-default is enabled, then what to revert). This may not always be true in the future, though, as capabilities increase...one part of me thinks you could just do random stuff like "Make me an excel except every cell is a powerpoint presentation" and a good enough AI would reason through and produce something without further input. But I think in most cases, folks have a real set of requirements in mind, and get all of them into the AI through a process of iteration in various ways. I think that's real work that requires skill and, in many cases, creativity, at least in the sense that someone else walking up to the same tool and prompting on their own would produce a very different output than you'd see if you asked the same person to retry the same project.
Time will tell.
I don't think we disagree that much. But the repo in question had basically no human input, at least no substantial one. It will be interesting where the courts will decide the boundary lies though.
Copyright of aggregated and curated LLM output has not been decided upon, but other curation precedents suggest it is going to be copyrightable, similar to how curated collections of facts are copyrightable, even though facts themselves are not.
It’s always good to have alternatives but without plugins this is not really obsidian competitor (yet).
Long term Opsidian user here. This looks exciting. Especially the UI being so snappy. Do you also support the plugin system?
Great question, currently not, but should be done in a week or less.
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.
UPDATE: added web version for testing https://opensidian.org/webversion/
What’s the benefit of tools like Obsidian vs using whatever code editor you have on hand? Why would I use it over vs, say, vs code?
For me it's the combination of:
1. Multimedia. I have a cookbook with photos and videos in my Obsidian, as well as songbooks with musical notation that renders properly.
2. Databases. e.g. for an international vacation I created the itinerary as a "Base" (structured database) that rendered out to a calendar and day-by-day pages. This even included floating itinerary items like "eat X kind of cuisine" to squeeze in on any day, shopping lists for gifts to bring back, as well as all train routes, flight numbers, hotel/ticket confirmation numbers and the like. Then on each day I could journal what we did and see what we still had to do. I was able to share these with everyone on the trip and make sure everyone got to experience their must-see items.
3. You can argue all of the above would also work as a website. But Obsidian makes this work across my phones and tablets too, in a way that I can edit from mobile whenever I need to jot down a quick edit. That's the killer feature.
Obsidian works on my phone without janky workarounds.
That one simple trick makes it incredibly useful for its intended purpose.
Exactly this. I've tried hacking together a syncing solution on both Android and iOS, from Syncthing, to Git via Termux (Android) or Working Copy (iOS). I didn't try NextCloud or Dropbox etc, but that Obsidian Just Works(tm) as smoothly as Apple Notes (but is available as a full-featured desktop app in Linux -- I know Apple Notes has a - slightly janky - web interface)... I was happy to pay for the sync and stop worrying about checking on my sync status or remembering to push my commits.
Plus the hotbar on mobile makes it easy to do bullets/checkboxes, as easy as typing on my computer keyboard.
Formatting, syncing, and organization but yeah the benefits are too small for many people including me. I just use vscode.
However, enough people find those things valuable enough that Obsidian has millions of paying users.
I don't think software really need to penetrate more than 1% of the market to be profitable. If Obsidian penetrated even 10% of the market, they would have been worth >$30B lol.
It’s the linking, write preview. The usability really
i'm not much into ethics usually, but this is kinda low.
ethics aside, where is the profit? rust/tauri is same electron except with rust. legally questionable "open-source" label?
why
Slopsidian.
Brought to you, once again, by Claude
Has it become a trend to pick up some proprietary software and vibecode a replacement for it and then slap a FOSS license on it?
Hehe...thats pretty much the story of how open source came to be ... Assuming RMS is 'vibecoding' after a ton of pizza and jolt :-)
>Has it become a trend to pick up some proprietary software and vibecode a replacement for it and then slap a FOSS license on it?
Very much, yes. It started niche, and then notable sloppified projects made the normie news (Artcraft, sloppified Adobe software stack) and Sony's "you will own nothing" stance made people target the PS5 and popular titles that are now popular decompilation and emulation projects.
After that made the rounds, it seems everyone has gone full tilt on remaking existing products, but worse (there are some that are decent, but this does not look like one of them)
It's cool and interesting, but I can't help but feel we're about the enter an entirely new era of anti-consumer lobbying leading to new legislation that will be an absolute bloodbath for these projects, all while making individual consumer rights even worse.
I can't even view OP's webpage since it's on a domain younger than 30 days old. Great way to filter out slop!