Here again we see the pain of trying to sell software to open source enthusiasts: the temptation to destroy the author's livelihood by copying their work is too great. By releasing a clone as open source, the copier gets to bask in the reflected glory of the original work. It's like trying to sell original oil paintings to master forgers. BitKeeper is the canonical example, but there are countless others.
I'm not sure "open source" has anything to do with this. Selling developer tools has always been a big risk even when the more likely scenario was another developer selling a closed source alternative to your tool.
Sublime Text itself was very much "inspired" by TextMate back when both of them were commercial and closed source.
This may be the pain of trying to sell software to developers. There are a lot of "open source enthusiasts" who don't do any more programming than simple shell scripts, and while they appreciate the philosophy of "if the project doesn't have the feature you want you can just add it," in practice they can't just add it. (Unless it can be added through a simple script, which -- ironically in this case -- you can do pretty well with a lot of closed source editors.)
The flip side, of course, is that only a limited number of developers can afford the time to write a full-featured programmers' editor with no expectation of recompense. That's not trivial stuff. There are an awful lot of free editors out there, but most of them end up being relatively feature-limited and, at best, "cult hits." Even getting to that point takes years.
(And, while I hope this won't seem too cynical, the pain points Lime's developer describes as his motivation don't strike me as coming from Sublime Text's status as closed source. They strike me as coming from its status as a one-person project. A one-person open source project is theoretically better than a one-person closed source project, but...)
Damn, isn't it frustrating to see how people are free to compete? Even worse, they're allowed to give away their competing products for free! The gall!
Seriously, though, you do know that there's no such thing as a free lunch, even when it comes to open source, right?
Except he's doing it because there is (to him) an impression that the original software isn't being maintained. So instead of letting a beloved piece of software disappear he cloned it and released it to the world.
The presumption that he's trying to destroy the original developers livelihood is naive at best.
The intention doesn't matter, the effect does. We are talking about risks of doing business with developers (which reimplementation is), not about some abstract morals.
Do you think that Sublime Text is a completely original work, or largely a clone of text editors that came before it? If the latter, then I'm not sure what copying has to do with open source, other than people who are involved with open source give away the copy instead of trying to make a living off of it.
That's why you open-source your software if you're selling to open source enthusiasts. I'd be just as happy to pay for an upgrade to a commercial version as I would be to upgrade from the "free trial" version.
That may be the only way, I agree. But because open source
pricing fails to capture the value of the software, you'll make 100x more writing closed source software for a more respectful industry.
Open source can mean your customers contribute to product development. Thus, "the value of the software" that people pay for does become diminished: it's just having the commercial license on hand, and not having to build from source yourself.
But we're not just a demanding (less respectful, in your terms) industry, we also are one that's willing to support itself - developers do pay to support each other.
His product will only take significant business from ST if it is better. Within reasonable bounds, the price of an editor is not going to be a deciding factor in the professional developer market.
This. If I needed simply a good open source editor, I could use vim or notepad++, and they're free as well; but I pay for ST because it's more useful for me.
This issue reflects the challenge of trying to sell music to people who can pirate the stuff. When the alternative to your product is free and close enough to substitute, the paid product needs to provide enough value to convince the market that it is worthwhile. Here you have a text editor that its audience feels has been abandoned, so it is not providing as much value as an open source alternative.
He should just change the headline since it doesn't really look like a Sublime Text clone anyhow. Just say something like "I'm building a sweet code editor inspired by some of the great editors I've used like TextMate and Sublime Text as well as some ideas I've been thinking about. If you'd like to work on a great new text editor, please join me."
No, he is definitely not creating a 'inspired by' editor, since a major point is compatibility with the existing ST plugins, so it has to be a near-clone to do that.
