I think it's a likely death sentence, although certainly not a guaranteed one. Clearly a lot of open source projects maintain active development for years/deca

I think it's a likely death sentence, although certainly not a guaranteed one. Clearly a lot of open source projects maintain active development for years/decades. But there aren't many success stories I can think of offhand when it comes to closed source commercial software converting to open source. The only big one that immediately comes to mind is OpenOffice, and it's a pretty unusual case -- it still had an actively-maintained proprietary commercial version developed alongside the open source version for years. If you as an individual think having your editor be open source is critical, you weren't using TextMate anyway. If you were using TextMate, you're probably willing to pay $50-60 for a "Mac-like experience" with a closed source but extensible editor. That mostly leaves diehard TextMate 1.x users and people who would try a free TextMate for beer rather than speech reasons. I'm dubious as to whether there's a sufficiently talented and motivated subset of that group to seriously further TM's development. Lastly, I'm not sure there's room for another "industrial strength" open source text editors. It's probably not much of an exaggeration to say that there's Emacs, Vim, jEdit for the weirdos, and Things Only Their Authors Use. And in all of the big cases, those editors are cross-platform. TM isn't and won't be for years, if ever.