Via an advertisement there, I discovered https://www.warp.dev/code which looks like an most incredible resource. That may be how applications like Trillium have such incredible documentation and coding. There are 271 contributors, and the documentation and features are incredible and beyond anything else I have seen in a note taking application. This piece of software and the mind blowing quality of the documentation and feature sets has made me reconsider Deepin with the local integration and Deepin IDE.
The problem is that the Trillium notes are in a database, whereas Obsidian’s are in mark down. I discovered Zettlr, whose notes are also in Markdown, and discuss that below..
I discovered https://www.zettlr.com/ from a discussion at https://www.xda-developers.com/found-open-source-app-like-obsidian-except-its-better/.
From that, I discovered Zettelkästen. More specifically, I learned what it was via Zettlr. The Zettelkasten method involves cross-referencing one’s knowledge base so that one can find relationships between concepts and create a living knowledgebase with minimal forgetfulness.1 Zettlr contains the ability to insert snippets using variables for the date, time, and unique ID numbers. This is something that I had been trying to do of my own accord using various applications over the years.
Obsidian has a great preview that one can use to directly copy to blogs and product great entries with links intact. It looks like Obsidian took Trilium’s preview and Zettlr’s markdown and file management to create their application. All three share a very similar sidebar and navigation motif.
I consider Obsidian to be like many Minecraft modification developers in recent years. They take a lot of permissively licensed opensource software and then wrap it in an all rights reserved vague statement and do not share any code or redistribution rights. Many minecraft mods say all rights reserved, which is not really a license. They incorporate and link other libraries. Java itself uses a classpath exception so they do not become GPL because of that, however when the mods rely on other libraries that are GPL, such as other mods, and then hide behind “all rights reserved” it really breaks my heart. One would think they would want their mods available at many different sites and not only the website they uploaded them too.
Electron is MIT licensed. This is not an accusation. This is my opinion. I suspect Obsidian used Trilium notes and possibly Zettlr code and is not compliant with the GPL. That is my opinion only. Trilium notes even comes with server software. The Obsidian Webclipper is great. Yet it irritates me to no end that an open source foundation, like Electron, and possibly some of the precursors of Obsidian, made the way to a piece of software that says you cannot even redistribute the binaries. They could go out of business, but with binaries around, people could use that great software for ages. The situation is contrary to the Linux ethos. I could be wrong, and they pulled their code from Memos, which has a very similiar interface. The Memos code is at https://github.com/usememos/memos. Memos is another project sponsored by Warp. I am not accusing Obsidian. Logseq is another GPL project with a great deal of similar features and buttons, and is available at https://github.com/logseq/logseq.
I am stating that it is very strange, and perhaps some AI agents are using GPL code and the downstream products are not GPL as they should be, but that is my opinion only.
- https://docs.zettlr.com/en/advanced/zkn-method/, retrieved December 14 2025
