That’s a hilarious poll addons_zz.
20% of responders value Sublime Text at $5 billion - a valuation of that amount would mean Jon was making a post-tax profit of at least $250 million a year, but more realistically for this kind of business he’d be needing a yearly post-tax profit somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion. To achieve that he’d need to be getting something like 10-20 million new users every year (the entire population of a mid-sized country). This forum currently has 28,192 users - the lowest available figure in the poll of $3 million looks rather optimistic - most likely is that ST has generated revenue of a few million dollars during its entire 10-11 year existence and a valuation of less than $1 million would be more likely [note that: 28,192 * $80 = $2,255,360].
I doubt Jon is making more that $150-200 thousand a year from it, but nothing wrong with that. It’s a nice cottage industry with a very decent pay cheque, he’s his own boss, provided gainful employment to a handful of people, he’s created a much loved piece of software that’s used by tens of thousands of people, heavily influenced the design of modern coding editors, and earned the respect of those who have an idea of what he set out to do - Sublime HQ News November 2007 (start with the bottom post and work upwards). Also, while he might not have invented simultaneous editing, he certainly popularized it and I am almost certain that Sublime Text was the first coding editor to have them. That’s all pretty impressive in my book.
I’m very glad to hear that Jon would prefer to ‘see Sublime open sourced rather than abandoned’. But fingers crossed ST will continue to evolve and operate as a commercial product for a long time, I’m firmly of the view that if Jon quit and ST became an open source project that would be the beginning of its demise.
P.S. Just noticed that only 5 people voted in addons_zz’s poll, so 20% was 1 person.