Lots of apps have open-source clients (for trust/auditability) but backends that are closed/locked somehow, e.g., Logseq.
There are a bunch of small problems people encounter here and there, which usually will never be solved by the company. Giving the community a route to improve their tool, would be good.
I don't particularly like client-side paid features, but:
- The client is fully FOSS, you can just patch the license check out. In fact, there are some forks on GitHub that do just that and provide binaries, and the authors don't seem to care, they even acknowledged them on Twitter (https://x.com/b3logos/status/1928366043094724937).
- There are plugins to sync without a paid plan
This works out quite well for them: if you choose a fork or a sync plugin, you don't get the same support that paying users do, so many users still end up buying a license. But you don't need to, which makes the whole thing not user-hostile.
I have bought a one-time license myself, and I'm very happy that I'm supporting the development of a FOSS project.
I think we will soon see the ability to write plugins that can even run server-side of SaaS solutions.
Software being open source almost always makes it more trustworthy, and I'm glad that more people are picking up on this over time.
> I generally like people being able to out food on the table
Completely agreed, and this makes for a frustrating paradox.
I don't use Obsidian because it's closed source, but I don't think it's evil or anything. Conversely, I pay for Immich, and I hope their model is sustainable.
What do people get out of replying like this?
What did you get out of calling out their counterclaim?
And yes, they respond based "on their own agenda". That's what all conversation and sharing of opinions entails: telling it from your perspective, and based on what you think it's better.
>rather than replying clearly on their own terms
What you quoted couldn't be clearer, or express the responder's terms any better. Your issue is not that the response is not on their own terms, it's that is not on your terms, where phrasing it similar to what the other person said is supposed to be bad.
But that's more of a you problem. Was just looking at another thread, and chanced on you berating someone for pointing to GNU's website as opposed to writing a set of custom arguments on the spot:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45679487
As long as they aren't abusive, people can answer anyway they damn please, including rewording what the parent wrote, or pointing to some link they agree with. Is that a novel concept?
>And I'd get even more relief if they admitted to having been an asshole on purpose and apologized. God forbid, stopped acting this way.
oh, the irony.
How is this not a contradiction? They're not contorting their words, they're just restating them with subtle changes to make it "correct". What?
> And yes, they respond based "on their own agenda". That's what all conversation and sharing of opinions entails: telling it from your perspective, and based on what you think it's better.
Yes, and do you not see how clapping back by "cleverly" rewriting someone words would come across as incredibly annoying? This is just a slightly more elaborate version of how children bicker! How do I need to explain this?
> But that's more of a you problem.
It certainly seems that way...
> oh, the irony
People getting hostile in response to hostility? Oh no, not the irony?! Case in point:
> As long as they aren't abusive, people can answer anyway they damn please, including rewording what the parent wrote,
This WAS abusive, that's my whole issue dude. It'd appear what is and isn't abusive isn't a fundamental force of the universe, and you and a few of your peers here just happen to not find what I - and imo, any average person with a reading comprehension - find immensely abusive.
"Contorting someones words" is said when someone changes what somebody said to make it appear as if they meant something else.
Not when someone merely expresses a different opinion, as their own, using some part of the other's wording.
>Yes, and do you not see how clapping back by "cleverly" rewriting someone words would come across as incredibly annoying?
No. That's a you problem. And even describing it as "rewriting someone words" would be a stretch. They merely used the same noun (which they need to, as they speak about the same thing), and contended that the opposite is true:
"I think the increasingly widespread attitude that only open source software is good and trustworthy increasingly annoying and problematic"
"Software being open source almost always makes it more trustworthy, and I'm glad that more people are picking up on this over time".
The only annoying comment I see in the whole exchange is yours.
>People getting hostile in response to hostility? Oh no, not the irony?!
The only hostility was in your mind, based on your premise that responding by reusing some of the same wording is "hostile".
I further hope someone will be there afterwards to gaslight you about how there's actually nothing wrong with it, and that it's all in your head (which is like no shit, where do you think hostility arrives to?), and that it's a you problem (whose problem would you be reporting on? nonsense...).
And then people bitch and moan about the internet being dead.
They didn't counter OP's claim, though. OP is essentially saying that software other than open-source can be trustworthy and the supposed counter-claim is that open-source software is more trustworthy. Regardless of that being true or false, it's not a counter to the claim that closed-source software can also be trustworthy.
And then there's the closed source's Cloud part and its holes as well, which is a whole other can of worms.
The problem is that quite a few open core companies immediately go from $0 / year to low to medium 6-digit-figures per year. This escalates the entire project sky-high in levels of internal scrutiny with a high chance of it not happening.
On the other hand, it was simple to argue why this is easily providing us with $50 in value per year. Now it is integrated with our normal license handling and it's actually slowly and steadily growing internally. We're up another 4-5 users from the last time I looked.
It more so was a warning that the combination of little reviewed community plugins and a not sandboxed macos binary is a potential risk. And with that sentiment I can also agree.
It's probably illegal too, as in many jurisdiction the public, or at least a health/food regulatory body should know the process and ingredients.
Take into account allergens, and on top of a matter of public knowledge and health, it can also be a matter of life and death.
It's like saying "Linux uses C" and now you instantly can copy Linux =)
It does however play a hugely important role in a recipe, in a way than the choice of language doesn't play in a program (especially considering turing completeness). So the analogy is broken.
Besides nobody made the point that list of ingredients makes a recipe.
Just that it's important to know the list of ingredients for a food you're gonna eat, and that it's even illegal to not disclose them (either to the public or a regulatory body) if you sell food.
Apologies if the parent comment was edited after you wrote yours but a "process and ingredients" does a recipe make.
The linked page has a clear explanation for why one might consider nonfree software to be unethical.
> If you're not interested at all, why did you even join the conversation?
Or was this a genuine question? I don't think you do those though. Are you then maybe getting tripped up on your own dumb headcanon? Cause honestly, given that this would be the third time in this thread that you're conjuring up a strawman and twisting words, you have to appreciate I have a hard time believing anything coming out of your mouth (keyboard?) at this point. It's almost as if there was a reason I went off about what I did, and it's coming back to bite you in the ass now...
To you, is a suggestion for someone to explain their own thoughts in their own words, rather than link to someone else's, a sign of no interest at all?
If you admit that they could be doing one of two things ("And sometimes ...") but you assume it's actually one of them in particular ("I think they asked for your take, not GNU's."), then this question could similarly be asked of you.
A bigger problem with my model is that it's a false dilemma. These are both just characterizations. Both can be true at the same time just fine, and so can neither.
It even does my own sentiment poorly. My actual issue with this whole exchange was not that their thoughts are unoriginal (although I'd be surprised), but that this way of responding I find extremely lazy and disrespectful, as well as generally unreasonable. They were asked for their opinion. It doesn't have to be good, it doesn't have to be rigorous, it just has to be theirs.
Linking out to some reading material and adding nothing else of substance fails even this most basic expectation. It's a discussion thread, not a newsletter. But then just like in the other subthread where the person above found me from, I'm sure they'd argue that this is just, like, my opinion. And that it sure is.
> We campaign for these freedoms because everyone deserves them. With these freedoms, the users (both individually and collectively) control the program and what it does for them. When users don't control the program, we call it a “nonfree” or “proprietary” program. The nonfree program controls the users, and the developer controls the program; this makes the program an instrument of unjust power.
It seems safe to say the author thinks that one creating "an instrument of unjust power" for oneself is unethical. Though, perhaps if the commenter in question pulled that quote out of the article, it could have helped their point.
If you actually care about this, stop alienating potential allies, and ideally start making arguments to support your case instead of telling people to RTFM (which in this case is even worse because "the manual" isn't as much of an authoritative mic drop as you seem to think it is).
You still have ethics ground if you think it the same way as repairability, actively blocking ways to repairs things you bought yourself is questionable, and keeping things closed source can be seen as a way to artificially prolonge a strict dependance on your vendor by impairing your ability to resolve issues by yourself.
No, for most it's because they evaluated a number of ethical, social, and technical concerns, and think so.
I was also a dreamer once upon a time, with M$ on my email signature and all that zealot attitude, then I had to support myself and face the reality that most supermarkets don't take pull requests.
Naturally I am not counting those, given that they are paid in tainted money as per OP's complaint.
We are surely talking about ethics,
> Closed-source software is unethical regardless of any of your unsubstantiated claims on its or open-source software's security.
And in that regard, there is also something to talk about regarding some prominent figures in open-source world.
I am well aware of that, this is why I remind people that proprietary software is bad actually.
Not all closed-source software is harmful; Obsidian here is a prime example of one which is not harmful and could be even considered as beneficial, despite being closed source, because of how open and supportive it's designed in everything else.
I was just confirming the point you made -- the definition of ethical is not absolute, and there are people that consider questionable things ethical.
> Obsidian here is a prime example of one which is not harmful and could be even considered as beneficial, despite being closed source
All proprietary software is unethical. It's as simple as that. No matter whether it's free or paid, no matter whether it's useful or harmful. If you have a right to use it but are deprived of the right to alter it, it is not ethical.
If people put their notes in, only open source software is good.
At best, one can tolerate a very big closed source company, who is unlikely to just do whatever with the data and has some track record for privacy, like Apple.
But trusting all your notes to a closed source app from a small peanuts company?
If Obsidian enshittified tonight so badly I had to stop using it, the only thing I'd kind of miss is dataview and bases.
And of those dataview is "just" parsing a bunch of markdown with javascript. Bases is a yaml format for displaying more markdown.
I'm pretty sure I could vibe-code some scripts over a weekend that cover most of my Obsidian use-cases and use any markdown-capable editor for writing.
That's why I use Obsidian (and stopped using Joplin, because - at the time - all my notes were in one obscure blob)
Should we tell them?
Paying money to Obsidian for writing yet another text editor seems like digging and filling holes to increase GDP to me.
Of course this always a bit of case by case, but obsidian is a very exposed and worthful target.
Building software takes time and resources. Experienced show that most open source projects do not make enough money to make the resource investment worthwhile, much less the time investment.
I generally like people being able to out food on the table, and if that means I have to pay for their software to use it or get updates, then I am happy to do so if that software is of value for me.
That of course doesn‘t mean I appreciate unnecessary vendor lock in, hostile subscription models, etc. All of these things are common with proprietary software, but they are not inherent to it.
Obsidian is a great example. Easy to takeout open formats, generous licensing model and no aggressive licensing implementation that makes it impossible to use the software offline. The team behind it seems to be able to make a living and people can still feel safe about the access to their notes.
Even if its not open source, it would be great progress if we‘ve had more software like obsidian