It seems that you are concerned about their funding, but I’m not sure there is reason to be. The project started with Angel investors that are friends of lead dev Tienson. He reported that Logseq pays devs about 2/3 of the salary of similar positions in for-profit companies, I am guessing because the dev team believes in trying to keep things open-source and are willing to make that sacrifice for that goal—at least at the time, not sure how things stand at this point. They have a large dev team compared to Obsidian (not sure how many—maybe 10 at this point? Obsidian has 2). And I think that they got another round of VC funding in the last year (someone who’s been following closely can provide the details, I think). So I just don’t see the concern about them suddenly running out of money. In my mind, it’s just a false dichotomy to think that they must keep all options open or have a real risk of shutting down suddenly. Obsidian is doing fine, I believe, keeping local free (as in beer) and charging for sync. And Logseq of course has the option of making local free and open source for non-commercial use but charging licenses for commercial use.
I am not an open-source zealot. Previously, I suggested that if they couldn’t commit to full open-source for all local features, to just take the product closed-source like Obsidian. I just don’t like them keeping things vague and open for so long and I don’t see the benefit of doing so. It just doesn’t make sense to me why they don’t make a clear commitment with clear lines and insist on keeping the option to claw back local features if they need to “because of business concerns”. I can’t imagine the scenario where they are about to shut down due to uncontrollable expenses and suddenly design some killer feature not available in any other software that people will clamor to pay for and it is going to save the company (but only at a decent profit, not to make them excessively rich ) so they can continue to offer other features free. There is a lot of competition, they used to promote open-source as their central differentiating feature, I promoted Logseq all throughout various notetaking communities due to this, and then it got walked back somewhat in a vague way where they are hesitant to make a clear committment going forward, and it made me uncomfortable, because I can’t understand the motivation for it.
Make local noncommercial free and open source forever; charge for commercial use, sync, and collaboration; and make a commitment to this going forward. I’ll sign up, help write the docs, promote the product in my courses to my students, encourage others to develop plugins, etc. The dev team can try to build a successful business and I hope they do so. They get the psychic benefit of building a useful open-source product that still provides a decent funding stream even though they might leave some opportunities for even more profitability on the table. If it fails, well, that’s software development for you, at least you build an open-source product that can still benefit the world, and you can startup something else new or get another position. Or, take the Angel and VC funding, try to keep all options open, worry about scenarios where the dev team might lose an opportunity to get rich, and hope that enough of the community doesn’t notice or care about these issues. If it fails, maybe there’s enough of what remains to still be useful open-source for a fork project, maybe not, but it’s less likely without that core commitment driving day to day development. I’ll pray that they don’t go the way of CDDB/Gracenote.