Comment by gelberhut@lemdro.id on Obsidian for Writing Manuals

Is Obsidian a good tool to use for writing technical manuals? 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.

If Obsidian is no good, I would love suggestions on software you have used to write short manuals with pictures, preferably not Word.

@gelberhut @effingjoe if I am a freelancer who gets paid for work done using #obsidian this doesn’t apply. Correct me if I’m wrong.

@tamowafy @gelberhut @effingjoe AFAIK you need to be working in a for-profit organization with 2 or more employees to need a commercial license for #Obsidian.

Hm. I keep notes in Obsidian, including work notes. I wonder if that violates the license. I might abandon Obsidian over this.

Eh. Theoretically, maybe. Practically, this is a problem of ‘what constitutes work use’.

In my opinion, the work notes I take in obsidian are my personal notes. I found obsidian myself, and use it myself for taking notes for work. Stuff doesn’t get shared to coworkers, other than the actual text I am writing when I copy paste it out of obsidian.

OP’s use case is a work use, in my opinion, as they are using obsidian to produce the output used for work.

Same would apply if a team used obsidian for notes, encouraged use of it for everyone in the team, and/or uses shared vaults as a ‘wiki’.

Actually, my employer honestly does not care. My department specifically uses unmanaged devices, which we’re also explicitly allowed to use privately. The data on them is ours, we are encouraged to encrypt it with a personal key. ‘Non-personal’ data is stored on onedrive or our own gitlab instance.

But I agree with you that most employers would :)

‘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.

That’s what obsidian state, yes.

Now, what constitutes ‘making money’?

If you use it to keep notes for your university courses, you effectively use it to further a cause which in the future will make you money, yet I’m sure you’d agree that doesn’t fall into ‘commercial use’.

If I use it to organize the research I do - the knowledge of which I then use in a commercial project - does that constitute work use? In my opinion - yes, I get paid to do that research, but it’s knowledge for me, so no, it is not ‘work use’ to me.

Next step - use it for notes specifically for a work project. As long as I am using it for myself and myself only, only sharing snippets of text that have no relevance to obsidian, not work use. Share a canvas created with obsidian? Work use. Share/publish a whole folder/vault as a wiki? Work use.

Now, what constitutes ‘being pregnant’? Does it begin when the egg is fertilized? Or does it begin when one has unprotected sex that will eventually lead to the egg being fertilized?

And, what constitutes ‘being dead’? Is it when the brain doesn’t function anymore? How would we classify a person, who is comatose, catatonic or braindead, then? Does death commence when the last cell in the body is dead? Would one then be considered alive, when a patch of skin is not ‘dead’ yet?

It’s nice to stake out the grey area of any topic, but if we are honest, it’s a never-ending game, that in your case intends to stall a conversation. Common sense tells you exactly what is work. If you are not sure, then discuss it with someone, ask a lawyer or make up your own opinion. Obsidian devs will not persecute anyone for using their software commercially without buying a commercial license. If you feel entitled to do so, then do so, but don’t try to disassemble the context to justify your actions.

It’s bad news for Obsidian, not me. There’s a million note taking applications out there.

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.

A vast majority don’t care how any individual uses them. They put collaboration features behind a paywall, but they also host the data. I liked the idea of hosting my files myself, which is what makes this all the more ridiculous. What extra cost does Obsidian incur whether I take a note about a book I read or I take a note about a meeting I was in?

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?

Man, now I have to go from championing Obsidian to warning people away from it. That sucks.

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.

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.

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