> I've always viewed Obsidian as the inverse of an open core product.

I'd like to hereby propose the "open shell" development model.

We don’t need a special term for interoperable.

A software system can be fully interoperable without any part of it (other than the interface) being open. In my definition, an Open Shell software solution is one in which a company makes it clear that they're focusing on building and selling (or making money from hosting/supporting) only the "Core" functionality, while exposing all of the higher level functionality as open source plugins and fostering a community to make it as easy as possible for others to improve these and maintain them over time. And preferably, the company would also pledge never to offer its own closed source functionality outside its definition of the core.

The licence method we went with for AS Notes (https://www.asnotes.io - a wikilinks and markdown based notes / docs / blog extension for VS code) was to make the client (extension) fully opensource with a public / private cryptographic licence key model, with a couple of pro gated features. I think an opensource product is very important for a notes product, where the implications of loosing access to a tool are huge for users that invest a lot of time in a knowledge base.

I don't really mind this way of doing it since I know that my data is "safe". I can at any time just grab my vault and open it in any editor. I can write my own editor. I can import the data into most other tools. It's when the data isn't open that I tend to avoid the product.

Exactly this. Conversely, most open source apps on android might as well be closed source with regards to your practical ability to export your data unless you use a ROM that gives you some form of root access (such as adb root).

Its "safe" as in you can access it but its not safe from Obsidian accessing it.

If you don't use their sync service, all your vault files are local only, and there isn't any mysterious telemetry happening in the background.

If you do use their sync service, it's end to end encrypted with your own local-only password, so Obsidian doesn't have a backdoor to your encrypted remote files either.

If you don't trust Obsidian's sync service, but want to sync files, you can sync your files in any other way you choose, like with git or webdav. You can keep it all self-hosted if you want to.

You could encryt your entire local vault too if you want to.

Obsidian's business model is just selling the sync subscription service. There's no ads component to incentivize data collection/tracking and pissing off their entire customer base.

So I can't find it in me to be worried about this one.

And if Obsidian did go rogue one day, the files are basically exported already, so whatever, it'd be easy to switch to something else.

I think the open-source obsidian plugins that aren't yet popular enough to have a lot of eyes actually checking over the source code yet are more suspect than Obsidian itself. Open-source on its own doesn't always actually prevent malicious actions or privacy violation, since most people just treat "open-source" as "this app is automatically trustworthy because surely someone else is keeping on eye on it" and either don't know how or don't bother to look at the source code themselves. But I'm not actually worried about that, either.

> If you don't use their sync service, all your vault files are local only, and there isn't any mysterious telemetry happening in the background.

I think the parent's point is that Obsidian could add any tracking they wanted and -- unless you're examining their TOS or your network closely -- you might never know. However:

> Obsidian's business model is just selling the sync subscription service. There's no ads component to incentivize data collection/tracking and pissing off their entire customer base.

And that to me seems deeply infused into Obsidian's entire culture. They built a community and they're not gonna mess that up. And like you say, if they do it's trivial to move one's markdown somewhere else.

This actually looks refreshingly simple. A lot of note-taking apps become productivity operating systems after a while.

I see it as “open data”. Despite not being open source at its core, it apparently tries to do nothing to lock you in by holding your data in a manner you can't easily access and interpret by other means.

[caveat: it has been on my “to play with” list for a long time, but I haven't yet, so I may not know enough for my thoughts to be relevant!]