Hacker News Reader

Comment by jshaqaw | Hacker News Reader

I love open source. But Obsidian exists. Cloning existing apps to open source is almost push-button in the age of Claude. Obsidian makes a good product and frankly barely charges for it. Yes it's closed source but since all your files are markdown there is no lock-in risk. I guess I'd rather see people in open source make new things than copy existing products especially when those products are made by small scrappy indie companies. If everything gets cloned I don't see who has any incentive to try and innovate the next new thing in commercial markets and honestly I see too little evidence of innovation vs. cloning in the open source world.

View on HN

> 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

However, Obsidian isn't a saas, it can't just disappear. As long as you have the installer you are fine.

People who care and don't want Obsidian to disappear should support them, not destroy them. They are providing fair price product.

This is an example of why I don't think we're getting anywhere near an age of abundance with AI: we're using the power we've gained in a reductive way.

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.

Obsidian isn’t hard to code. That was never the barrier. The barrier was that the creators took a risk and made something new with their design choices. LLMs (at least today) can clone and mash-up but they don’t make new choices. Open source as a whole is a lot better at copying than creating. Happy to be corrected but all the major user apps I know of are clones of commercial products.

Eh obsidian commandeered the idea from roam who commandeered the idea from org-mode etc.

sort of. It does a lot less than Roam, etc., which is good because Roam is complicated. In my experience the simple model of obsidian is just right, and the implementation is excellent.

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

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

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com