concerns? easy
Open sourcing could turn ST into something akin to eclipse where 245629365236454 developers all add feature upon feature upon feature and you end up with a bloated, ugly , slow, mishmash of utter crap. And this thread is horrendously old and i thought it was a new thread grrr. mental note to self, look at date of original posting before replying 
There was another editor that tried to follow the model of paid open source: E-text.
Long story short, last commit is 4 years old.
Back in the day, when sublime was just a little baby, E was a pretty good editor.
Then it was open sourced.
Then it was abandoned.
Then we discovered Sublime 
[quote=âeMarvinâ]
[quote=âiamntzâ]There was another editor that tried to follow the model of paid open source: E-text.
Long story short, last commit[/quote]
is 4 years old.
With the substantial difference that Sublime Text has a devoted following and E-Text didnât.[/quote]
E-texteditor had a large following back in the days, it was the Textmate-for-not-apple-users, I remember the forum threads asking to opensource it and as iamntz said the fast decline once it open-sourced⌠lucky me ST was grown enough to be a replacement (even though I still miss the file-dragging actions)âŚ
Another example of editor died soon after open-sourcing is Crimson Editor (speaking about 2003/2004), it gone from open source to abandoned like the same dayâŚ
Intellij and Ecplise may be opensource, but they are not the same as ST, they are IDEs and ST is notâŚ
I also agree that atom.io will eventually win in polish and perks like git integration. Alas, it might even win as an ecosystem of extensions and plugins. But I doubt it could catch up in sheer speed, which is a very compelling advantage of this editor, unless we witnessed something as outrageously outlandish as a hardware JavaScript coprocessor or something. Besides, many users, especially professionals, are resistant to changing workflows. Take LaTeXTools, for instance, a SublimeText tool that thousands of users rely on, and the labor of months if not years of commitment (and commits!) by its developer. Try porting that to atom.io⌠So, overall, I very much hope jps will open-source this product, under or not under his stewardship, handing it over to a select (and lean) group of core developers who will ensure its viability for the next few years at least.
@iamntz Progress with E-text slowed down a lot and had a lot of the frustrations that weâre seeing here that caused Alex to open source it.
Iâm not sure open sourcing would be right for Sublime and thatâs ultimately Jonâs decision but I think the Sublime audience would be much more active than the Windows only audience for E-text.
As someone who has spent a lot of time writing and maintaing open source projects, I can say unequivocally that open sourcing ST will not magically help. Open source software only succeeds on a large scale when there is consistent funding behind it. Why? Because someone has to pay for the time it takes even to review pull requests, deal with bug reports, etc. And without some kind of funding, that someone ends up being the repo maintainers. Ask yourself how long you would be willing to put in 5-10 hours per week for free.
Even if the code base is open sourced, how many qualified C++ programmers are there out there in the ST community who are willing to spend lots of their free time over an extended period of time to work on ST? And you would need people who know the native toolkits of OS X, Linux and Windows. This is not a trivial thing that is being proposed. After an initial spurt of enthusiasm, ST is just as likely to be abandoned or progress at a slow pace as open source.
Agree 100% with aparajita.
People get religious about open vs closed source yet tend to have very little understanding of the real costs and benefits of either approach. Ultimately, with projects like this the dev is the only person qualified to make the call.
So what is the current state? Is there something holding up v3? Is there a roadblock or malaise? Itâs summer 2014, when will v3 be out? By xmas? In 2015?
[quote=âjpsâ]Hello,
Due in no small part to this, Iâve been putting very sporadic hours into Sublime Text. At this stage, Iâm not sure what itâs future is. The two paths are to either get over the hump, and get it done with the new UI, or to officially stop development work, and release the code as is as open source.
Jon[/quote]
While Iâm sure that many would welcome the project as open source that we really feel a lot better with something official even if we have to wait. Look at how well TextMate has done since it went open source. (hint: not well) The developer went through a similar problem with development and couldnât get over the hump to release a new version everybody was waiting so patiently for. Perhaps instead of going completely open source you could move some of the functionality out of the main project into some kind of plugin system and then let others contribute to those external components while you focus on the core functionality.
I can imagine that this is a rather complicated project and that maintaining it yourself is a big challenge.
Sublime has saved me countless hours during the past months and it would be ashame if it were to wither and die.
Thank you for the product and I hope you will find the motivation to get over the hump and find joy in the development.
While I am not an open-source zealot, more of a open-source novice (using the religious meaning that is), if the Sublime Text project is now under a malaise there is no reason to not open source it.
The arguments above are valid, the time involved to oversee the code pull requests would be a big ask, but is it any more than trying to maintain the project yourself?
Let some other coders in but maintain the last say in what goes into it.
About the whole open-source argument, there is a sort of middle ground that could be taken. There is already a huge number of coders that have developed plugins, and not received any monetary gain for their efforts. Would they not be more than likely to give help to the codebase if necessary? Jon would still maintain the rights but not have as much strain upon him and IF coders wanted to help they could, with no constraints placed on anyone to meet any perceived goals. How could it be anymore slower than it is now?
Also on a lighter note, it isnât the summer of 2014, it is the winter here in Australia, land of SublimeText. 
Please read the thread in full and note all of the dates. Someone resurrected this thread from 2009 that was written before Sublime Text X (later Sublime Text 2) was even announced.
The most recent update from Sublime HQ Pty is at ST still alive?. As it says, feel free to contact sales@sublimetext.com for any related questions.
[quote=âkoinkâ]
I think that misses the point of the concerns people raise about lack of development and communication. Itâs about the time invested in workflow/writing plugins for a potentially dead end.[/quote]
No, it gets exactly to the heart of that point. I use Sublime every single day for hours every day. For me, it has already paid for itself multiple times over. I am getting my moneys worth and then some with Sublime EXACTLY as it is today, without any additional features or a future road map. If Jon never released another version of Sublime, Iâd be sad, but it wouldnât stop me from getting value from Sublime in the future. If Sublime fits into your work flow now, why worry about when the next release will come out? If it doesnât then you should probably keep looking for something that will.
[quote=ântenneyâ]
I think that misses the point of the concerns people raise about lack of development and communication. Itâs about the time invested in workflow/writing plugins for a potentially dead end.
No, it gets exactly to the heart of that point. I use Sublime every single day for hours every day. For me, it has already paid for itself multiple times over. I am getting my moneys worth and then some with Sublime EXACTLY as it is today, without any additional features or a future road map. If Jon never released another version of Sublime, Iâd be sad, but it wouldnât stop me from getting value from Sublime in the future. If Sublime fits into your work flow now, why worry about when the next release will come out? If it doesnât then you should probably keep looking for something that will.[/quote]
The logic is that itâs better to suffer the pain of switching now than risk the possibility of that pain in the future. Go figureâŚ
So each time this discussion recurs we get good restatements of the two or three points of view you could have about this. In general, Iâve held to the view that current ST3 bits work well for me, so I use them. I do notice the disinterest of the company that continues to take money for the software, but opt not to fret much, since the malaise doesnât have an operational cost.
Until today.
Iâve been doing more work with Ruby, and I wanted an REPL to exec code from the editor. wuubâs SublimeREPL might do that. Trouble is, it doesnât quite work in my environment â throws âissues.â Itâs not really right to bug the author, who clearly tells us not to expect new work on his extensions until Sublime HQ clarifies STâs future.
I also use some paid extensions. And notice that they, too, are not advancing. They work now, but the time will come when the environment they assume changes. I fear they wonât have much incentive to adjust.
Extensibility is one of the editorâs great characteristics. But without stable and active core bits, the ecosystem surrounding that core will surely degrade.
I very much hope actually that the bloke is not seriously ill, or in some other similar kind of acute distress, because this is the only event that could perhaps justify such a deafening and longstanding silence. And if, alas, this dreadful scenario were to be true, I would be the first to be regretful for expressing my exasperation on this forum.
It is difficult to imagine such a disappearance to be the result of indifference, mere indecisiveness, or strategyâŚ
In my opinion ST is dead. There is a lot of months from last release. I bought ST3 for 70$ last year march i suppose. I started even write IdeTools plugin for transform text editor to fully functional IDE. I hope Jon is alive and SublimeText story will continue to the happy end,
No need to get testy.
I was talking about new users. Once the software is purchased, if it works for what it was originally purchased for, then whether or not there is future development on the software is beside the point. Look at George R.R. Martin. He still writes on a wordstar word processor. He hasnât updated to a newer one because heâs used to wordstar, and it fits his workflow. It doesnât matter that word has far more features than wordstar, or that wordstar doesnât even exist as a company any more. At the point where he bought wordstar, companies didnât tell users crap about update schedules, or future development. That didnât matter in his purchase. Wordstar did what he wanted it to do RIGHT THEN. So, my comment about purchasing if it meets your workflow now applies to new users, or to users that have used Sublime for years. If itâs not meeting your needs, move on to something else, but donât base your purchase on what some software says it will deliver 6 months from now. If you do, youâll be screwed when they decide feature X is too much effort and it gets dropped. When I buy software, I buy it on the premise that it meets my needs now, not in some future release.
I just purchased the software today. I didnât have to, but I did. I bought it because it work well and I like the key combos and plugins (among other things).
Ultimately, it does sadden me to come into the forums and find out the developer has been MIA for a while. But I tend to not care as the software is already pretty solid for my needs (which are coding efficientlyâŚ).
What the developer(s) have created is pretty nice as it is. Hopefully they return and the community doesnât die off.