I think there is a special value in open source when it comes to a personal knowlege base. We invest so much time in it, and we need to know that it's not going to be taken away from us, or made unaffordable. I made https://www.asnotes.io (basically obsidian with markdown and nested wikilinking in a VS Code extension), because I wanted and thought others would want something that is a) open source and b) version control friendly so we don't even have to rely on a sync server being there in the future.

Considering Microsoft's been making more and more of VSCode non-FOSS, I'm pretty sure using it as your base is at odds with your goals.

> We invest so much time in it, and we need to know that it's not going to be taken away from us

Agreed, but in the case of Obsidian, since the way they manage the data, they cannot just "take it away from us", it'll always sit where you leave it, as it's not a SaaS or a remote service. And even if the desktop client went away, all your data and notes are still available.

Otherwise I generally agree with you, all my professional and personal tooling shouldn't be able to take away agency from me, but it's worth separate the tooling from the data, as loosing the tooling sucks but loosing the data is a lot worse, at least they cannot do that.

Agree wholeheartedly, but you already have that with Obsidian. You own the vault, and if you don't want obsidian, its already in markdown.