FWIW, I was hesitant about obsidian for the same reasons. I would’ve preferred an open source editor and a syntax like asciidoc. But the fact that everything is markdown and it being such a common standard does make obsidian being closed source more palatable^[1]. And tbh, for note-taking/“second brain” purposes, a relatively constrained format like markdown is pretty suitable. I wouldn’t want it for technical writing but it serves the purpose for quick and dirty tasks like quickly jotting down notes^[2]. And any other markdown language wouldn’t have the same amount of tooling (e.g. org-mode is underspecified and essentially emacs-only unless you see stick to a specific subset of features)

I understand the definition of “Freedom” as laid out by e.g. the FSF. I was explaining why your argumentation is not convincing unless the audience already agrees that complicity in genocide is an acceptable tradeoff to software freedoms. I’m saying you could make a more convincing argument by just not making that comparison in the first place. Unless your point was “perhaps we should reconsider whether Open Source is Good”.

This assumes the audience will agree that genocide is an acceptable tradeoff for software freedoms.

I don’t know if “freedom to modify source code” and “committing a genocide” are morally comparable. This seems to undermine your point. I would have picked a different analogy