Weekly Journal 134 - Logseq, Neovim

Logseq

All the drama around Red Hat and Hashicorp these past several weeks has made me slightly paranoid about taking a dependency on corporate-owned open source projects for key parts of my computing foundation. I’ve been using Logseq to manage my personal knowledge base now for the past few months and now I have to revisit that decision. Logseq has a corporation backing it, it has taken outside investments from venture capital firms, and they require a contributor license agreement (CLA) for any outside code contributions. This mirrors the situation with Hashicorp prior to their mass license change.

While Logseq is currently available under the AGPL v3 license, which from my perspective is a good thing. However, the terms of the CLA grant Logseq a perpetual license to any code contributions made by the community. This means they have ownership over such contributions and could unilaterally change the license at any time just like Hashicorp did. This makes me nervous about continuing to use Logseq. As my knowledge base continues to grow it will become harder and harder to migrate it to another tool if they decide to change licenses in the future. (That very thing has happened enough times over the past several years that I feel like it’s inevitable)

On the plus side, the AGPL v3 is a full copyleft license so in theory Logseq should have fewer reasons to change their license. Hashicorp changed their license to cut off competitors that were leveraging their Hashicorp’s open source products against them. With the AGPL, any competitor who tried to leverage Logseq would have to publicly release their changes. Logseq also stores its data as Markdown text files so I don’t have to worry about my data being locked up in some proprietary file format or binary database. I really want to continue using Logseq, but at the same time it makes me nervous.

Neovim

In a slightly related note, I’ve been playing around with Neovim again. Partially because I wanted to check out the NvChad configuration framework, and partially because I wanted to see what the current status of the Neorg note taking plugin. NvChad was easy to install and provides a really nice look to Neovim out of the box. I’m impressed with how nice everything looks and how simple it was to get started. I’ve had a bit more trouble getting Neorg installed, mostly due to NvChad having its own way of managing custom plugins, and I need to find a tutorial or reference on how to use it. I tried it out several months ago, but I have completely forgotten the syntax for things like linking files together. More to come on this topic as I (slowly) get it figured out.