Praxis wrote:Because, generally speaking, open source means no money/hobby development.
Listen--I respect your view, but I think you're wrong. I think many users are fair. I think most users are...lazy. And cheap. If there's an easy download that's free, they'll do it. If there is no easy download that's free, but an easy way to pay ,then many will take it (the iTunes effect). I think that there are many, many developers out there who don't care about intellectual property despite their avocation. An open source version would siphon a ton of sales, even if there's no downloadable binary (we *are* developers after all, we can get it built). And a downloadable pirated binary would become available anyway; heck, it *will* be available even as things stand now. There'll be a ton of demand.
I agree that users are lazy, I say so in my fairware introduction. It's a point I already address with fairware by making the "nag screen" easier to remove by contributing than by figuring how to "unfairly" remove it.
My experiment shows interesting results with my main application: All hours I invest in it are paid at a rate that is very similar to the money I was receiving when it was closed source, so empirical evidence seems to be on my side here. I wrote an article about that success at http://www.hardcoded.net/articles/fairw ... -works.htm
Praxis wrote:Perhaps most importantly: it's an issue of *control*. Jon, thank goodness, seems to be taking extreme care in how his creation is being crafted. Have you seen Notepad++ lately? It's good for what it is, and has tons of features, but it doesn't have people raving about it like TextMate (and now, Sublime Text). The way it goes right now, Jon has every bit of control over his interpretation of what a text editor ought to be like. Happily, I rather agree with him (and apparently most of you do, too).
I think you're making a mistake here by associating open source with "free for all" development where everyone adds his own little feature and we end up with an unmaintainable mess. It's very possible to maintain control of an open source application, all you have to do is to avoid accepting all code contributions.
Praxis wrote:I have every bit of confidence that should Jon not wish to make money from ST any more, he would open source it. No, I don't know him. He doesn't know me. I'm just not that concerned, though. I respect those who are concerned, but I just can't bring myself to tell someone to give away their work. You want to invest all that time and make it open source? Great. Just don't insist that others do the work and release it on your terms.
I don't insist that Jon releases his work as open source. It's his work, he does whatever he wants. I'm merely expressing my discomfort at the close-ness of ST's source, mentioning risks for the user and pointing to a past case where users were hurt by this (TextMate). You may do wishful thinking all you want, but it is still possible for this to happen with ST, a likely case being ST making a lot of money and Jon not wanting to work on it anymore. In this case, Jon has no incentive for either working on ST or open sourcing it, and this would hurt the users.