I’m trying out Obsidian for taking notes, and this made me laugh.
I just commented this elsewhere, but I personally feel that their reasons for being closed source are worse than actually just being closed source.
There’s nothing there that really strikes me as disingenuous or bad. If they wanna be closed source, they can be, for whatever reason(s) they want. Does it mean a number of people (me included) are less likely to use it? Yes. But outside of our bubble here, most people don’t care about open vs closed source software.
There’s nothing disingenuous about that? Did we read the same things?
Being closed source doesn’t fix any of the issues they noted.
I’d rather they just say “I’m ashamed of my code”.
- Open source doesn’t guarantee safety without specific (and expensive) third party audits.
This one is debatable. Without expert eyes, open source code doesn’t do much to guarantee safety. Expert eyes aren’t necessarily expensive, but for non-super-popular projects, they are hard to entice. Can you spot a cross site request forgery attack vector at a glance? Have you used open source software without checking for this specific attack vector in all relevant code? So, as stated, this is basically true.
- Open source doesn’t mean faster development. Code review often takes longer than development.
This is true. You need those experts from point one to check if contributed code introduces security vulnerabilities. Code is work^2. Work to write and work to review. (Also work to maintain, so work^3, but whatever.)
- Open source projects don’t last forever.
This seems false, but is phrased super oddly. I mean, nothing lasts forever, so sure, but open source code is essentially available for as long as someone is interested in it enough to preserve it, so I would generally disagree.
- Open source requires a lot of extra effort, and the developers would rather put that effort into the app itself.
This is unambiguously true. I maintain several fairly popular open source libraries, and they take work. I also see the benefit in maintaining them as open source projects, but that is my own discretion, as a fan of open source software. If I were more worried about profit, I could definitely see this as a barrier to releasing my code as open source, considering I need to pay those engineers for the work they do just maintaining the project as an open source project.
This is also not to be confused with a source-available project, where the source code is freely available, but not necessarily under an open source license, which can be much easier to maintain.
It’s extra work they don’t totally see the value in and they want to be able to sell their product? Those seem like pretty normal reasons not to maintain an open source project.
It is 5 minutes of work to use your source control tool, and have a read only view for other people.
Being open source doesn’t mean you have to accept PRs or pay for audits. It just means your source is… Open…
They also want to be able to support their families by making money through the Obsidian application, which could be more difficult in an open source environment.
This is the only one that seems really legit to me. That and the other commenter that said open source is more work, which is probably true, and if you’re not getting benefit it could be a net loss.
