> Yes it's closed source but since all your files are markdown there is no lock-in risk

Not true. The lock-in risk is the flow you get used to with Obsidian. If Obsidian disappears, I'm left with a bunch of MD files... so that's just like my file system, and if I needed just a file system to begin with, I wouldn't use Obsidian

I legitimately don't understand this sentiment. If cloning software is really as easy as you say it is nowadays, the only difference between our own agent stack, the small scrappy indie devs, and commercial software companies, is who pays for the tokens.

Assuming this, I see even LESS of a reason NOT to have a wide array of open versions we can all hack our way from. We'll collectively have to invest less if we have an open base to work from. Reinventing the wheel doesn't stop being reinventing the wheel because an LLM did it.

There are no new programs to make. https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-project-of-software...

I know people hate it when I draw a comparison between crypto/NFTs and AI since the latter has some utility, but it really is crazy just how similar the vibes are, and you can see this in this recent fad of people trying to clone existing software with AI.

In case anyone has a fuzzy memory, back during peak NFT hype grifters would take art made by other artists and attempt to tokenize it as NFTs without the consent of the original artist, or otherwise possibly copy said artist's work and make a collection of it.

It was disgusting and parasitic then and it's disgusting and parasitic now.

I don't think this is a problem that's going to be solved by aligning everyone ethically.

Why do you think it's not copyrightable? It absolutely is under current US law. OP copied the interfaces, which is perfectly legal, and then defined their own implementations. Even if they are working with an LLM, that process of interactive prompting establishes authorship.

Copyright of aggregated and curated LLM output has not been decided upon, but other curation precedents suggest it is going to be copyrightable, similar to how curated collections of facts are copyrightable, even though facts themselves are not.

Great question, currently not, but should be done in a week or less.

For me it's the combination of:

1. Multimedia. I have a cookbook with photos and videos in my Obsidian, as well as songbooks with musical notation that renders properly.

2. Databases. e.g. for an international vacation I created the itinerary as a "Base" (structured database) that rendered out to a calendar and day-by-day pages. This even included floating itinerary items like "eat X kind of cuisine" to squeeze in on any day, shopping lists for gifts to bring back, as well as all train routes, flight numbers, hotel/ticket confirmation numbers and the like. Then on each day I could journal what we did and see what we still had to do. I was able to share these with everyone on the trip and make sure everyone got to experience their must-see items.

3. You can argue all of the above would also work as a website. But Obsidian makes this work across my phones and tablets too, in a way that I can edit from mobile whenever I need to jot down a quick edit. That's the killer feature.

Obsidian works on my phone without janky workarounds.

That one simple trick makes it incredibly useful for its intended purpose.

Formatting, syncing, and organization but yeah the benefits are too small for many people including me. I just use vscode.

However, enough people find those things valuable enough that Obsidian has millions of paying users.

I don't think software really need to penetrate more than 1% of the market to be profitable. If Obsidian penetrated even 10% of the market, they would have been worth >$30B lol.

It’s the linking, write preview. The usability really

Hehe...thats pretty much the story of how open source came to be ... Assuming RMS is 'vibecoding' after a ton of pizza and jolt :-)

>Has it become a trend to pick up some proprietary software and vibecode a replacement for it and then slap a FOSS license on it?

Very much, yes. It started niche, and then notable sloppified projects made the normie news (Artcraft, sloppified Adobe software stack) and Sony's "you will own nothing" stance made people target the PS5 and popular titles that are now popular decompilation and emulation projects.

After that made the rounds, it seems everyone has gone full tilt on remaking existing products, but worse (there are some that are decent, but this does not look like one of them)

It's cool and interesting, but I can't help but feel we're about the enter an entirely new era of anti-consumer lobbying leading to new legislation that will be an absolute bloodbath for these projects, all while making individual consumer rights even worse.

I can't even view OP's webpage since it's on a domain younger than 30 days old. Great way to filter out slop!