How much would you be willing to pay and how much do you think it'd take? The sublime text package manager has been installed 1.1 million times. Lets assume 10% of those are to a unique paid user at $60. That's $6 million right there. Sublime Text's popularity is only rising and if not a single update were released can expect good sales for several years.
What do you think the odds are that Sublime Text sells a million licenses in the next 5 years? I think the equation solves itself from here.
I'd probably be willing to pay at least $200, especially if it's spread out over some milestones. For example, I'd rather pay more after I see that people are actually actively working on it after it becomes open source. In fact, spread out over reasonable milestones I can imagine spending far more.
Of course, I'm probably an outlier here.
I think your assumption of 1.1 million installs belonging to 10% users is way off. Many people probably never purchase ST, but still install the Package Manager, especially since ST remains basically usable without paying. I'd think it's closer to 1%.
Of course, that still leaves us with quite a lot of money. To be honest, I hadn't looked at the figure of how many installs the package manager had - I'm pretty surprised (and happy) that ST is this popular. Guess I'll have to keep dreaming.
I still can't see how on purely financial terms, open sourcing ST becomes a better outcome than keeping it closed source.
The open source avenue (awesome as it would be) is effectively stopping any future income for releases.
That means finding an alternative business model for the developer to sustain himself. Sounds like a lot of risk and hassle, if i were the developer, why should i expose myself to that?
The flip side is, for long term adoption, it pretty much has to open source itself.
>The flip side is, for long term adoption, it pretty much has to open source itself.
Really? I don't see IntelliJ Idea suffering much from NOT being Open Source. Or even TextMate for that matter, which still has friends even while being mediocre at launch and 7 years late to show any improvement.
>TextMate was suffering from not being open sourced, and hadn't shown any improvement in 7 years. So he open sourced it, and it is now actively developed by the community.
I follow the repo but I don't see any exciting action. Maybe in a few more years (which is my definition of stagnating).
>IntelliJ CE has been open source for quite some time now.
Yes, but that's just a gimmick. All the interesting stuff is in the commercial edition, and it's not like IDEA is managed like an Open Source project, it's just released as one (like Oracle's MySQL).
TextMate was suffering from not being open sourced, and hadn't shown any improvement in 7 years. So he open sourced it, and it is now actively developed by the community.
TextMate was suffering from a lack of development. Someone else took over development, in this case the community.
Had TM continued in its previous, active commercial mode, it may be ever more popular today, not having given alternatives a chance to in turn become popular.
>> Really? I don't see IntelliJ Idea suffering much from NOT being Open Source
Yeah definitely. Idea & Visual Studio (among others) are top quality products, and yet both nothing more than a chapter 11 filing away from being vague memories.
Contrast adoption of Idea vs Eclipse.
Consider when Windows is no longer relevant, VS will necessarily degenerate to being a niche product (even though it is arguably one of the finest IDEs available at any price today).
Every Idea product I've used, with the exception of Rubymine 3.0, has been top notch. PHPStorm, ReSharper and IntelliJ are great. Some times there are benefits to having a small closed source, private paid team of professionals writing software. Some times it's beneficial to opening it up to the whole world and saying "what do you want to see added?"
I don't think anyone's disputing the quality of the products, Idea's ItelliJ, Microsoft's Visual Studio, ST2 - they're all quality software.
I just wanted to pick a bone with something you said though:
>> Some times there are benefits to having a small closed source, private paid team of professionals writing software
This is a comment about development methodology - the Cathedral and the Bazaar. Take out the words "closed source" (e.g. think Chromium browser) which have no baring on your statement, and then i agree.
Not a gimmick. While it's true that a lot of interesting stuff isn't there, you can happily develop Android apps using IntelliJ CE. Also, having source is extremely useful for people writing IDE plugins; doing this before IntelliJ CE was quite painful.
I must have installed the package manager a good 10 times across all the installs and different platforms I used to use ST2 on and I only paid for ST once.
I'm probably an outlier in that I work on lots of different systems, but I wouldn't be surprised if the 1.1 million package manager installs represents far less than 1.1 million uniques, and that's before you start adjusting down for pirates and non-paying users who just live with the nag dialog.
What do you think the odds are that Sublime Text sells a million licenses in the next 5 years? I think the equation solves itself from here.