alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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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.
There are no new programs to make. https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-project-of-software...
I don't think this is a problem that's going to be solved by aligning everyone ethically.
> 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