As several people have pointed out, both the "Personal" and "Catalyst" licenses are intended for personal use only, making this quite an expensive product should I want to use it for work as well. But in the full license text, there seems to be an even more problematic phrasing:
> The use of OBSIDIAN for the exercise of your own trade or profession (...) does not qualify as personal use.
I would interpret this to mean that I as a developer can not use this to exercise the "trade" of software development. That would in turn mean that I can not use this to make notes of stuff I learn on my own time, if it is related to software development.
I would imagine most people not caring about this kind of license limitation, but it would be interesting if it was intended this way, or if this is just me being bad at licenses.
If we're internet armchair lawyering then I'd point out that a carpenter building something is "exercising their trade or profession" but a carpenter reading a textbook or watching a how-to video is not.
Analogously, a salaried software developer learning something and taking notes on their own time would be in the clear but a freelance developer tracking their projects or clients would be in violation.
What's not clear is how it applies to a salaried developer learning something and taking notes on the job (ie is time provided for professional development part of practicing your trade or merely a perk?) or a freelance developer using this product at all (same issue as previous scenario, except now it's not even clear where your job ends and personal time begins).
I'm pretty sure that doesn't qualify. To my mind that's training or study of a trade which is distinct from practicing (ie getting paid for) it.
Where it gets weird is cases where the delineation between practice and study is unclear. Researchers are professionally employed to study things. On the clock professional development is study, but it's paid for by your employer. Freelancers manage their own time making even the distinction between paid and unpaid work unclear in some cases - were you studying as part of a current contract, or to better prepare yourself to take on similar work in the future?
Commercial license is 50$ per year. Not even 5 bucks per month. I do not think this qualifies as "expensive", especially if you intend to use it for work related stuff
There is also Joplin (https://joplinapp.org/), which is open source and has multiple Apps available (including mobile). I don’t think it uses plain markdown files as the primary data store, but notes are written in it and they can be exported as Markdown files.
I got myself stuck in quiver which is a nice tool but has no movement in its project and has horrible exporting. Beware. I still need to move my .qlite notes into markdown.
My problem with Quiver wasn't just no updates, its a good tool how it is, but that plus no web/android/windows. Just figured it was time to finally hop of that sinking ship.
I.. wish someone had told me this 2 years ago when I started using quiver and it was already dead, before I put hundreds of notes in it that are now stuck in .qlite or .. pdf i think?
Does Quiver solve the same problems? Sorry it's a hard word to Google so not sure I found the app you are thinking of.
50/y is definitely a think about it and review yearly when budgeting type of expense as a personal expense, because all those recurring expenses add up! But as a business expense, if a $100k/y dev asks for a $50 tool I think their boss will say "why you waste my time asking, just get it and we'll pay for it".
I would say Quiver targets the same problem space. There’s some overlap and there are some healthy differences. I didn’t mention it to propose it as an alternative, but to illustrate that “expensive” is not just about absolute cost.
My biggest problem is the license is pretty strict, so I don't really have room to try it and see if it works for me.
90% of my notes are work related, so I don't really generate enough "hobby" notes to stress the tool and see if I want to use it. I'm not going to drop $50 to try and it and see if I like it. I'm also not going to violate their license to see if I like it.
I wish there were a trial for the commercial version. 14 or 30 days would be really useful as an evaluation period. Without being able to try it before I buy, though, it ends up being a pass from me even though $50 isn't _that_ expensive.
Not all people are living in an environment where they have an income that allows one to afford this. For some $4 is a lot, for some it is peanuts. Context matters.
I don't think that's relevant, I don't feel entitled to anything. My point was just that the $4's would add up. There are 2286 packages on my PC at the moment, which ones should I pay for? I can't even imagine earning that much money.
Moreover, are you suggesting that people should feel guilty for using free software?
The whole discussion was about how 'expensive' this particular software was, at $4/mo. $4 is the price of a cup of coffee. If the software makes you more productive than one cup of coffee per month would, then it seems like $4 is not expensive at all.
Of those 2286 packages on your PC, how many of them are written by individual software engineers who are trying to make a living by writing software? And how many of them contribute to your overall wellbeing? I'm guessing that 99% of those packages are used by programs that you yourself don't use, that just come packaged with your OS or some other product. The other 1%, yes, I think you should think about paying for.
We live in a world where a certain kind of extractive personality--Zuckerberg, Gates, Ellison--makes billions from their software, because they are willing to be an asshole-to-the-hilt with their anti-competitive, unethical, and often downright illegal behavior. The 'nice guys' who write and maintain your compiler (if gcc) or editor (if vim or emacs) or scripting language (virtually all of them) and any number of other tools that we use daily, will struggle to pay their hospital bills in retirement. And yet people balk at $4/mo for software that they might use for years. And even if they only used it for 1 month, that $4 is inconsequential compared to the other factors (like learning curve, time investment, etc).
I do think people should be spending some money on their software tools each year. Maybe 1% of their income? That's around $100/mo, which seems like an awful lot, but only in comparison to the current price they're paying of $0. But think of how much better your tools would be, if the developer who makes them could earn a living wage from them, without having to embrace the capitalistic ideals that make us hate computers and software in the firstplace.
While much of that is true, you again seem to be assuming everyone who uses notetaking software earns some kind of US/SF SWE salary from your $100/mo calculation.
I really dislike this cup of coffee that is commonplace. Buying coffee from Starbucks is really expensive! Coffee costs about 30c to make yourself. Some people buy coffee every day - over a year that can up to a month's rent in a world-class city.
Personally I have paid for a lot of software over the years. I think 95% of the time I have ended up getting almost no value out of those purchases, especially with iOS apps and PC games I never play. I wish I had not been so frivolous with those $4 coffee-cup Steam purcahses and instead spent all that money donating to open source projects which I actually do use every day. In the future I will be trying to do so.
By your calculations I should be spending less than $10 per month on software. And I'm a software developer, just not in USA. If I spent $4 just for Obsidian, I'd be left with $6 for cloud file storage, music and video streaming, and other subscriptions.
Yes. I've built multiple pieces of free software, including open source drivers, data packages, libraries and even the odd game mod. Those projects have been used by individuals, corporations and other projects, both opensource and closed.
And no, I'm not entitled to free software, but I am entitled to where I spend my time, money and support. I do financially support open source projects that I use (and keep a spreadsheet in Notion to track that on a yearly basis). I also believe that if I'm going to integrate software into my day-to-day and depend on that software, it must be open source or have an open source available alternative (ala Android).
Open source isn't about making (or saving) a dollar. It's about software being more than just a means to profit.
I disagree. $50 for note taking app only is expensive compared to something like Google Docs which does much more functionality and includes cloud storage.
The product is applicable to anyone who needs a knowledge base so it’s $50/employee and that adds up quickly.
While the developer is free to charge whatever they like, I don’t like the trend of these products priced based on people thinking $50 isn’t that much and that spiraling into what should be a one time fee to every piece of software being $50/year forever.
This reminds me of the 4 hour workweek where there’s a plan to create recurring streams of revenue for little to no work.
I think the amount of time put into this product doesn’t warrant that price. Even though I think it’s a really neat product.
Yeah. Photoshop is only $10/mo. Many IntelliJ IDEs are $12.50/mo and you get to keep them if you stop paying. Both of those are core revenue drivers for many of the employees who use them. $4/mo is quite expensive for a markdown editor IMO.
In other words, a year's worth of this (which is based off the idea that you would actually be using it. If you plan to use something you don't just stop using it after a month), is an entire month's worth of rent that you could pay instead.
Or maybe a different perspective, a month's worth of this is the same price as a month's worth of groceries.
Hi there! Sorry it's our first time doing a license like this.
If I understand correctly, licenses are usually written more strictly for legal purposes, but in my opinion your use case sounds like it should belong to personal use.
If anyone has pointers for us to make the license text more clear, please let me know!
I would not write my own license. I'd really recommend you get a lawyer look over the text you have (that shouldn't be too expensive, it's a one time cost), or look at existing ones that are actually written by lawyers. For a public license (to restrict commercial use), I'd recommend both LicenseZero Prosperity ( https://prosperitylicense.com/versions/3.0.0 ) and the Polyform licenses ( https://polyformproject.org/ ).
Those are more geared towards developer tools, so I'm not sure whether they'd be a good fit for your product. But all of them are written in simple to understand language so you should be able to figure that out by youself, and at the very least get a few pointers. If not, that is considered a bug with the license, and both projects are very open to feedback.
Obsidian folks: please don't use any of the aforementioned licenses. The reality is that they're _not_ a good fit (although the author would probably love to get you as a client to handle your EULA and convince you to use one of the others for your eventually-open-source plans, and that would be an even worse idea).
Why are they not a good fit? From a shallow reading, I thought Prosperity and the Polyform licenses would be fairly similar in intent to the licenses they have on their page. I can't imagine the authors (not author) of Polyform/Prosperity would care either way, and since nobody ever claimed those are open source licenses I don't understand your other ill-made point either. Maybe you refer to the Parity license? That one would make no sense in this context at all, and I doubt anybody would suggest it here.
Also, since your post is fairly negative and unsubstantiated overall, would you care to suggest an alternative?
Licenses are written by people versed in the appropriate laws. That’s why they come across as “more strict”, for precision’s sake. However, one should be very careful about trying to emulate legal precision just by virtue of stricter language.
> licenses are usually written more strictly for legal purposes
Well written legal documents are precise (not strict). The trouble is that you haven't unambiguously defined what qualifies as personal use, and there are a rather large number of obvious edge cases. This is a good example of something that should be drafted by a qualified attorney.
As a feedback from me: the license doesn't leave any room for evaluation on the commercial side.
90% of the notes I generate are for my business, and probably ~10% of my notes are for personal stuff. The volume of personal notes isn't enough to be worth having my notes separated out while I trial Obsidian. Since I can't put any of my commercial notes in it without paying for it, I'm just giving up trying it.
If Obsidian works well for me, I'd definitely consider putting down $50/year for it. The price seems a little high to me, but if it works well, then I'd probably do it. But the license doesn't let me evaluate it, so I won't be able to find out if it works well for me. $50/year is way too high for me to put down to see if I like it.
A 14-day or 30-day evaluation period in the commercial license text would be really helpful to letting me see if Obsidian works for me.
The simple answer is: don't write your own software license, because if you're not a lawyer (or if you're a lawyer not specialized in this area of law), you'll get it wrong.
> The use of OBSIDIAN for the exercise of your own trade or profession (...) does not qualify as personal use.
I would interpret this to mean that I as a developer can not use this to exercise the "trade" of software development. That would in turn mean that I can not use this to make notes of stuff I learn on my own time, if it is related to software development.
I would imagine most people not caring about this kind of license limitation, but it would be interesting if it was intended this way, or if this is just me being bad at licenses.