my own personal meeting notes
... are work-related and thus fall under commercial use.
You seemed to think that was crazy, but also don’t seem to understand why Obsidian is hurt more by this decision than I am.
How is Obsidian hurt by you not using it? The only way I see is through the threats you made to "warn other people", this would be vindictive damage done by you against an indie developer team, who made a private pet project of theirs available to the public.
I am not the person writing a manual. Reading comprehension is key to having an intelligent discussion about any topic via text. Please pay attention.
I would like to write an Operation Manual for municipality’s water system.
Writing comprehension is key to having an intelligent discussion about any topic via text. Please pay attention.
Edit: Apparently I have no reading comprehension. I am sorry. I got confused at some point.
No, you didn't or I counter-argued and you seem to not have understood my question in the new context that I provided.
‘what constitutes work use
It's Commercial Use as opposed to Private Use.
"Commercial use describes any activity in which you use a product or service for financial gain. This includes whenever you use software to create marketing materials, since those materials are used for business purposes with the intention of increasing sales." - HubSpot
In other words: You use it as a means to make money. Plain and simple.
I would like to write an Operation Manual for municipality’s water system. There will be embedded screenshots and some links to other sections of the document.
Ideally we could “publish” to offline html. The customer would also like a printed manual.
This is not personal use. This is commercial use.
If my employer was telling everyone to use Obsidian that would be a different story
In that case your employer would need to provide you with a license.
Not to mention, the core obsidian application is lackluster at best; it’s the plugins that really make it stand out.
If Obsidian is lackluster, then why even complain about its licensing model. Just move on to another programm.
How much of the money goes to plugin creators?
I don't know and I don't think it matters. Plugin creators frequently provide donation methods on their sites. I also don't believe that Obsidian is as profitable as you might think. I don't think the income generated through licensing covers what the Dev team actually puts in in terms of work, although I don't have any figures on that.
This is also a poor attempt at moving the goal post. You just realized that you are not behaving ethically... and instead of sucking up to it and either paying 50$/year for a commercial license or moving on to another product (which most definitely has a licensing model as well) you are hating on an indie software dev team. Go and play with OneNote.
You miss the point. The same argument could be brought forth against any other commercial license, like MS Office. But you are right, the answer is: none and I consider myself a FOSS advocate, but this is not the world we live in. Obsidian Dev Team puts in work and for them to be able to continue doing so, they need compensation, it's work after all.
Most software doesn't even differentiate between private and commercial use or let's you pay for both, but makes private use cheaper. What obligation does Obsidian suddenly have to be free for commercial use? It's already free for private use, educational purposes and even for freelance work. If someone is making money using a tool, then why is it ridiculous to pay for the tool?
No need to apologize. Thank you for sharing your idea. I'll keep an eye out for natural folders. I think I still have two folders that qualify for this as stated in my post: a diary folder and a template folder.
I can agree with this. But this suggests that my topic-wise foldering wasn't logical. So what is logical to sort by?
Man, now I have to go from championing Obsidian to warning people away from it. That sucks.
What are you talking about?! How is commercial licensing of an indie product something to warn people about? Maybe start by warning people of Microsoft, Adobe, Oracle, SAP, because their licensing models are horrendously exploitive.
You are just frustrated that your entitlement for a free product was not satisfied. Your reaction to vent against Obsidian and by that its Dev Team is bizarre.
It’s bad news for Obsidian, not me.
How is that bad news for Obsidian? The creators don't care that you don't use their product if you are not willing to pay for it. What a strange way to frame it like Obsidian Dev Team would need to woo you to use their product by giving it to you for free or something like that. Bizarre.
There’s a million note taking applications out there.
Those have commercial licensing requirements as well. The issue is not Obsidian, but your intent on commercial use. Obsidian actually has very generous terms btw: free for education, private use and freelance. Compare that to the license requirement of any other common software you use.
I might abandon Obsidian over this.
You could just get rid of your MS Office License instead, but this seems more like a common value issue, where users don't value the work invested in developing a tool/thing as highly as the creator.
Also: Other note-taking apps have other licensing requirements or in-app-ads. Assuming you could dodge paying for one service by migrating your operations to another one is naive.
Apparently I have no reading comprehension. I am sorry. I got confused at some point.