> I'm mixing the two because I think developers should value their time and profit from the value they add. I want them to build viable businesses so they get wealthy from their efforts and can continue keeping useful products alive.

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.

Obsidian is free lol!

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]

[1] https://obsidian.md/help/sync-notes [2] https://forum.obsidian.md/t/open-sourcing-of-obsidian/1515/1...

> If they open sourced it, there would be immediate competition. Anyone could fork it and circumvent/compete with any premium features they might want to add to it in the future.

Would it? Something like Zulip seems like a way better target in that case, but Zulip seems to manage just fine with open-source code and running their own platform people can pay for.

Not saying it is easy nor not hard, I'm just saying I don't agree with "either you do open source, or you go broke" because history shows us there are more choices than that.

> every line of code written by a human should have a dollar sign attached to it.

Every line of code that adds value should have some of that value should GO BACK INTO THE PROJECT.

I'm against the idea a successful product should be open source, even when you have full conrol of your data and they only charge for convenience.

Its an assinine philosophy that makes for WORSE products. Your projects would do better with revenue. More time, better marketing, other people to help.

Octave developer gave up after 25 years[0]. Instead of a robust competitor with a full team of people working on it and generational wealth for the value he created, he gave up struggling to pay bills.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13603575

Which is why I think Obsidian is such a weird piece of software. It's free. It doesn't lock your own data behind a paywall. But, it only allows you to modify it in very specific plugin API ways. I pay for software all the time, and I don't expect it to be open source. But for software I don't pay for, I do expect it to be open source.