Hey,
Is it still a good idea to invest time in learning/customizing ST3 or did the development stopped? Last blog entry is from over a year ago and last beta build from last August.
Just wondering if it’s time to move to atom.io or TM2.
Thanks!
EDIT: this is not a troll post. I’m currently writing a coding book + preparing a course for March 2015 and am wondering if I should choose another editor to use for both the book and the course.
I’ve received emails from Jon over the past couple of months about little tweaks to various things that affect Package Control. He has indicated he is still working on ST3 and is going to include some of the tweaks in the next build.
You can also contact sales@sublimetext.com to hear from Kari with specific concerns.
Can you please give me a list of small-medium companies that adopted this business model and succeeded?
The only product I know was E-text. And look how well it did!
TM2 is dead, I thought? At least its development speed has really decreased. Atom.io is a sick joke, a text editor based upon a web browser engine. Finally an editor which is capable of being exploited with JavaScript! 
One huge problem with Atom is the 2MB file size limit.
discuss.atom.io/t/2mb-limitatio … ssion/3286
In the past I’ve seen sluggishness navigating regular code files.
I do use sublime to read sql dump files from time to time which are very large.
Sad ST is not open source, community would not have left the development. Now is long wait for releases, no bug fixes. There are several alternatives. Atom, open source, from github, but it is very slow, need long time to start programm, yet a lot need to done. Maybe in the future. Bracketshere better in this case, but still too incompletely, and buggy. But the biggest problem with these alternatives, the consumption of RAM, they really consume a lot of memory, of course, now it’s no problem, I am for example have 6GB RAM and its enough for me, and people have even more memory now, 8-16GB, but I do not understand how this editors can consume so much RAM.
[quote=“iamntz”]
Can you please give me a list of small-medium companies that adopted this business model and succeeded?
The only product I know was E-text. And look how well it did![/quote]
Red Hat. They were small at one time, after all.
Right, except they didn’t never sold software per se. They sell support, training and so on. But not software.
It’s funny that even if open source is such a successful business model for everyone, no one was able to give me a reasonable answer in couple of days.
[quote=“iamntz”]
Right, except they didn’t never sold software per se. They sell support, training and so on. But not software.
It’s funny that even if open source is such a successful business model for everyone, no one was able to give me a reasonable answer in couple of days.[/quote]
Actually, they do sell software in addition to support. I remember paying good money back in the day for official Red Hat CDs. In fact, they still sell it now. You can get a copy of official Red Hat Linux Server without any support for $349. The desktop version is $49 and the workstation version is $179. Just look at their price list here: redhat.com/wapps/store/catalog.html
Red Hat’s model can best be described as “you buy our version of Linux, you can optionally get support for x amount of time, with the option to buy additional support, training, etc.”
As far as not answering you sooner, well, I don’t always check this forum every day.
Right, but can you also provide an example where the company is a small one (today, not 15 years ago)? Because when redhat & co started, the market was a bit different.
Also, because you mentioned RH: how can you contribute to the RH source code?
Here are a few:
Admittedly, a lot of the newer, smaller open source companies tend to sell big-business oriented products, but they do exist.
That’s a little complicated, since a lot of what Red Hat does is bundle up code produced by other people and package it up (though many of those people, such a bunch of core Linux kernel developers, also happen to be on Red Hat’s payroll). However, if you contribute to the Linux kernel, you indirectly contribute to Red Hat. The same applies when it comes to contributing to anything else Red Hat packages.
However, there are some projects that Red Hat itself manages. For example, the gcc compiler suite is managed by Red Hat after they bought out Cygnus solutions. So by contributing to gcc, you’re also contributing to Red Hat.
As far as contributing directly to stuff that’s more-or-less unique to Red Hat, well, the best bet is to contribute to the Fedora project. Fedora is kind of like an “advanced preview” version of stuff that’s going to go into Red Hat’s commercial offerings in the future and many of Fedora’s contributions eventually do make it to Red Hat proper.
Now, one option if Sublime were to open source itself (and I’m not saying it should or shouldn’t, that’s up to its current devs to decide if it’s worth it), is to go with something along the lines of an “open core” model, where they offer some powerful core set of features as open source but then have a “Professional” version with additional features as purely commercial. A good example of an editor that already does this is Komodo by Active State. The core editor, Komodo Edit, is open source, but it’s also part of a much fancier, larger project, Komodo IDE.
Thank you.
Now that I’m re-reading our little discussion I see that I was a bit too insistent; in fact, i heard the „ST should go open source” but i never heard „because look at X, they did that and they are successful”. I was just curious to see softwares that goes on this business model successfully.
(on a quick look over your list, most companies sell support or crippled versions of the commercial app; not that is not a good model, but it may not be appropriate for a text editor)
[quote=“iamntz”]
Thank you.
Now that I’m re-reading our little discussion I see that I was a bit too insistent; in fact, i heard the „ST should go open source” but i never heard „because look at X, they did that and they are successful”. I was just curious to see softwares that goes on this business model successfully.[/quote]
Open sourcing ST wouldn’t make it magically get a reboot and be saved, but technically it would make it possible simply because if somebody wants to step up to lead the project, he needs to have legal access to the source code. If the ST one and only dev is hit by a bus, the product is very likely to just disappear and never get any new release.
Also, you are asking how they can make money by open sourcing the product, an open sourced software is not necessarilly generating money or meant to generate money. Yes a company can make money by choosing the open source model, but in this case open sourcing ST would probably mean more making sure community led editions can be built if the company goes under. People advocating for open sourcing ST do it to make sure the product does not disappear, not to make sure the company behind the product doesn’t disappear.
There is an open source ‘clone’ of Sublime at Lime:
Has 42 contributors on GitHub… Slow news there too - their last blog update was in July.
And they don’t have a forum so it’s difficult to guage how much support they have. I don’t see an obvious ‘donate’ button but they link to Bountysource where it appears you can pay $$ for features.
But if you want to contribute to something you are IMO better off heading there than waiting for something (anything?) to happen with Sublime Text.
To quote Dr. McCoy… It’s Dead Jim.
Admittedly, Atom is not up to par with Sublime Text yet. However, it has gotten a lot better over the last few months, and the development pace is staggering with releases more or less every day.
I use both Atom and Sublime 3dev, yes Atom is a bit less snappy than Sublime but not so much for me, they are both speedy compared to IDEs. Yes Atom has bugs, it’s normal, it’s in heavy development, they haven’t even reached a 1.0 (0.169 as of today), but it is now usable for a lot of day to day tasks. There are even features such as the markdown live preview pane and git/github integration that are not available in Sublime or via plugins. I think that if there is no reaction by Sublime to release something soon, Atom will just replace Sublime for most people, they copied a lot of good stuff from Sublime, they develop their software in the open, you can report bugs and those bugs are not ignored.
I switched from Geany to Sublime because Geany was never releasing anything new and my needs were growing, it’s very likely that I will switchfrom Sublime to Atom for the same reason. I want to use software that is actually maintained, especially when I pay for it.
