It's free to read, not free to use. As it's from one of the involved authors, they probably got permission for this release. The problem with piracy is lack of permission/consent, not the act itself.

People are making books freely available all the time, even those they sell on other platforms. Nothing wrong with this.

> It’s a markdown editor, but they can’t modify the markdown standard,

They have several modifications of Markdown, everyone has. But not everything makes sense to implement in a flavour of Markdown. YAML is for structured data significant better than a freeform-format, especially when you're in the phase of building the foundation of a new feature-family.

The complain is valid, Markdown is for documents, free form, free flow, structured data are a very different use case, and while YAML is better for the job, it's still a different language with different smell.

But Obsidian is a tool for managing knowledge, always has been; it's not just a plain Markdown-editor. All those features which are going beyond simple flavoured text, have always been part of it's Core-Mission, just not materialized yet.

Obsidian is already a wiki in itself.

The first sentence of the documentation already says it: "turn any set of notes into a powerful database". It's really just that, basically. It's a database-view, where the vault is the database and the rows are your files. There is a fancy GUI for creating views, and it seems there is the ability for live-editing data from within the view. Basically a more user-friendly replacement for the very popular dataview-plugin.

Maybe it's a bit harder to understand, as it's a more mushy than the usual relational database.

> The first sentence of the documentation already says it: "turn any set of notes into a powerful database

No, horrible job at explaining. What does it mean to turn any set of notes into a powerful database? What does it mean to "turn"? Does it mean that a file will become a database? Or does it mean that a file can be interpreted as a database? And why set of notes? If I have a single note, can I turn that into a database too? Are the records of the database files, or items in a file? What is happening when I type ![[Untitled.base]]? Is the file where I typed that a database now? Or does that text assume that the file named Untitled must be a database?

They do a horrible job at explaining it.

I'd like a demonstration of what's powerful about it.

Like, why would I want to take advantage of this, and how? I'm with you here. I don't get it. I can stick data into SQLite and do all kinds of neat stuff. Why am I preferring a mushy database trapped inside Obsidian?

Well everything comes in shades. Lets say you write meetingnprotocols of your meetings down with obsidian. The markdown/freeform and cross-linkable text body of obsidian is perfect for this. But you'd now be able to have a bit richer search over the notes based on who was present. This allows relatively normal people to do that, without having to dive too deep into databases plus it already lives in the app where you take the notes.

As someone who uses Sqlite for a ton of things I don't think the exietence of sqlite makes this useless.

This is obviously for people for whom notes are a primary knowledge storage mechanism, and for whom that mechanism is obsidian.

I “could” stick data in SQLite but if I’m not then it’s quite useless to me.

> What does it mean to turn any set of notes into a powerful database?

You must be fun at parties. Complaining about everything, but not even bother to read the damn manual... It's explained on the third sentence on that site. Ok, to be fair, there is a big picture between those parts, and you have to follow some links for more details.

> And why set of notes?

Just curious, do you even know Obsidian? Have you ever used it? You read like someone who has no clue about this software, jump right in the middle of the manual, and then complain that you missed the tutorial.

Obsidian is a markdown-editor with knowledge base. Notes are its lifeline, and they have since nearly the beginning the option to put metadata into each note in a special section (in yaml), basically the header of the note. This metadata are now called properties. Bases is a feature building up on this metadata, offering a database-like experience for viewing and editing them in a specialized UI. The database, is the vault, the folder+subfolder containing the notes. Each note is a row in that database.

This is all explained in the documentation, if you just would read it...

Yes, but the average Obsidian user may or may not know what a database is an why they should care. As an engineer I like precise language, but we should not forget that multiple audiences require multiple levels of explainations.

Otherwise it is a bit like saying "all monads are functors" when trying to make your reader care for investing time and energy into understanding the concept of monads. The problem there of course is that explaination is circular: without the reader knowing what a monad or a functor is they can't understand the explaination.

A good explaination gives you the technically correct slogan in the beginning (for the advanced readers) and then explains the words and what you can do with such a database and why you should care. Many explainations skip the last step and leave that part as an exercise to the reader.

> Yes, but the average Obsidian user may or may not know what a database

You can't constantly optimize your communication for the least educated recipient. Obsidian is full of technical, specialized terms. If you don't know a word, research it.

And database as a concept is common knowledge today. Everyone will have the word heard in news at least, most will have a rough understanding of its purpose. And people using obsidian are usually not the most uneducated, there have a certain level of technical expertise. Most will also know and understand the dataview-plugin.

Yes, of course you can optimize your communications. Humans tend to donthat constantly, this is just a matter (or: a mirror) of your priorities. If you care you optimize your communications and don't do if you won't. Whether you care about a particular target audience or you don't is up to you and nobody else.

However, it isn't exactly rocket science and if one developes such a feature it makes sense to test it with multiple realistic usecases anyways, so why not just use those to show the users how it can be used?

Unless ofc a feature is developed in mental isolation by a recluse with a niche interest in the code without thinking about the potential use at all. But then it is probably more like a extracagant hobby than a serious project that others should rely on.

There is nothing strange about this, people simply had a different understanding of the world. Your understanding of it would be the SciFi, because at the time people were not aware of space having a vacuum, or that the moon is already outside earths atmosphere.

Which is not illegal for personal usage. You are just not allowed to share it, or even resell it. And even this has special cases.

It's Germany, certain parties are corrupt on higher levels, to the point of being harmful. They protect the interests of certain industries, even if it means burning down the country. The one suing here is Axel Springer, a well known misinformation-complex, with very strong political connections.

No, it's not. But your phrasing reads like you're from the Nazi-Bubble, so you likely don't care for facts anyway.

> Ok, I'll bite... what if an "ad" on a website is a bit of javascript that mines bitcoins using my GPU? Does this mean I have to let it do this?

Maybe. The Court has only ruled that the lower instance has to research the topic more, there is no clear answer yet. But it's really notable how incredible wild the judgment is. They are speaking about objectcode and bytecode, and which of them are protected by law or not. F**ing insane. It's not really clear whether they are actually talking about JavaScript, or if someone explained/understood it wrong, or if they probably mean WebAssembly? Is WebAssembly used for ads and handled by Adblockers?

Genuinely, I won't care what the ruling is: my computer, my rules!

:)

Considering we are moving towards a Cyberpunk-esque world, I wouldn't bet too hard on this. Greed finds a way.

> Imagine what the software industry would look like if an LLM could look at any completed software product, and a few weeks to a month later have made a perfect copy of it.

Humans have always done that, some are even low enough and blatantly copy the original apps assets & code. LLM is only speeding this up.

> People seems generally uninterested in fixing this too.

It's competition. It's in the nature of capitalism to support this. Of course, it sucks to be the one losing. And it's harmful if the winner-side is cheating. But it's not like there is a viable solution for this in a divided world full of Nations. You can't have everything cheap, and fair.

Apparently, administrative permissions and the name/URL. In this case also the dev. As it's under MIT-license, they can't buy the software itself, but they can control the public appearance and merges, until someone forks it and becomes more successful.

> As it's under MIT-license, they can't buy the software itself

This is a common misconception. Just because the author or original IP owner chose to release it under MIT doesn't mean they no longer own it -- and if the company wants to acquire it they can. They can never remove-from-the-internet the existing MIT-licensed versions (though they could take down their own copies), but being the owners they could certainly decide to release future versions under a different license.