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.
Check if makrdown formatting functionality is enough for you or not - it is pretty limited.
Do not forget to purchase proper obsidian license - your usecase is not covered by a free version.
Do not forget to purchase proper obsidian license - your usecase is not covered by a free version.
Can you elaborate on this? Are you referencing their “Publish” feature?
No. I mean the following: "Commercial Use Licenses are required whenever Obsidian is being used for work for a business with two or more personnel. Sole proprietorships or other one-person organizations do not require a Commercial Use License. Work for educational purposes does not require a Commercial Use License.
Commercial Use Licenses must be purchased on an annual and per user basis. Commercial users must purchase at least as many licenses as the number of people who will be using Obsidian.
You may use Obsidian commercially for free for 14 days to evaluate the app before purchase."
@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.
I see same text as you. As @EpiphanicSynchronicity@pkm.social] already mentioned, it looks like you are working in an organization which includes less then 2 people. Your customers are not your employer.
@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.
Agree.
@EpiphanicSynchronicity @tamowafy @gelberhut @effingjoe “the use of OBSIDIAN for the exercise of your own trade or profession for which you are compensated compensation (e.g. teamwork with colleagues, writing work reports, etc.) does not qualify as Personal Use”
Please provide a link to the quote.
@gelberhut Sorry, should have done that: https://obsidian.md/terms
Hm. I keep notes in Obsidian, including work notes. I wonder if that violates the license. I might abandon Obsidian over this.
including work notes
This requires a commercial license. If your work does not meet few exceptions mentioned in the text I quoted above.
Sorry for bad news …
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’.
I also see the definition of “work use” rather fuzzy. I have discussed this on Reddit some time ago. And conclusion was: if it is somehow work related you need a license, does matter if you share your voult or on not.
Practically, obsidian does not hunt for people who use the soft without a proper license.
On the other hand obsidian is developed by 2 people, I believe 3 now.
Btw, your employer most probably will disagree with your definition of personal notes as well and the fact that you install obsidian on a work hardware.
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.
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?
This depends on what do you need form a note taking app. But if your needs are covered by many - great you have a big list to choose from.
Man, now I have to go from championing Obsidian to warning people away from it. That sucks.
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.
I don’t see what function or feature would be missing from Obsidian that would make it inappropriate to use. There’s even a plugin to export html files.
