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Here's what I'd love someone to organize: A Kickstarter campaign to raise enough money to pay the ST developer to make ST open-source. If ST becomes open-sour

by edanm 14y ago

Here's what I'd love someone to organize: A Kickstarter campaign to raise enough money to pay the ST developer to make ST open-source. If ST becomes open-source, that solves one of the biggest issues many people have with ST, especially those coming from a vim/emacs background. This is something I know I would pay for, and I believe others would as well.

mattmanser 14y ago
Here's what I'd love someone to organize: A Kickstarter campaign to raise enough money to pay Microsoft to make Windows open-source. If Windows becomes open-source, that solves one of the biggest issues many people have with Windows, especially those coming from a Linux background. This is something I know I would pay for, and I believe others would as well.
- pbreit 14y ago
  Is that a reasonable comparison? No.
  - theallan 14y ago
    Why not? Its the same principle just a question of scale.
    - arnarbi 14y ago
      That's a straw man argument. "Same, except for scale" alone does not make it a reasonable comparison.
    - petercooper 14y ago
      I tried that one on a gun nut with no luck. "If you think it's your right to own and carry a gun, then why don't you think North Korea should be allowed to have its own nukes?"
- shanelja 14y ago
  Here's what I'd love someone to organize: A Kickstarter campaign to raise enough money to pay The Government to make Everything Free. If Everything becomes free, that solves one of the biggest issues many people have with The Government, especially those coming from a Poor background. This is something I know I would pay for, and I believe others would as well. Anything sounds ridiculous at scale
  - dkuntz2 14y ago
    It's called true socialism. It's a perfectly viable political system, provided it's correctly setup.
    - shanelja 14y ago
      Unfortunately, it's for the most part flawed as the correct setup you mention requires the human element to behave itself to maintain balance.
      - dkuntz2 14y ago
        I know. Hence the lack of true, pure socialist countries in the world today. It also requires a post-scarcity economy. Which, supposedly we could achieve if we worked towards it, but again, that human thing keeps us from doing that.
  - pkulak 14y ago
    I think paying to open source SublimeText is a bit more ridiculous than paying the government. SublimeText is a license to print money at this point. It's the _default_ editor for just about every (non-bearded) engineer and costs $60 (soon, $70). The government, after all, is just a representation of its people. If the people want communism, then that's what happens.
    - wmboy 14y ago
      I'm not trying to validate the Kickstarter idea, but thought I'd add that making it open source doesn't mean they would have to stop selling it. WooThemes is an obvious example of a company that makes a heap of money selling open source software.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- edanm 14y ago
  If you're suggesting that this won't work because the numbers don't make sense, then I think a better way to go about it is to do exactly what forrestthewoods did in another comment - talk about actual numbers. Much more convincing than making analogies which most people can dismiss pretty easily.
forrestthewoods 14y ago
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.
- edanm 14y ago
  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.
  - 3amOpsGuy 14y ago
    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.
    - pretoriusB 14y ago
      >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).
davej 14y ago
Textmate 2 is open source now and I've been using it as my primary text editor for the last couple of months. It's become really solid and it's definitely worth a look (if you're on Mac).
- Shorel 14y ago
  I'm not on a Mac.
  - Jgrubb 14y ago
    unless you.on_a_mac comment.does_not_apply
jzwinck 14y ago
Is there a precedent for making something that exists to become open source using KickStarter money? I proposed this very thing to KS once and they rejected me. But I don't know if they make these judgments by their perception of the product rather than the nature of the transaction.
- streptomycin 14y ago
  I don't know about KickStarter specifically, but the general concept has been used several times. Blender is probably the most notable example http://www.blender.org/blenderorg/blender-foundation/history/ http://www.blender.org/blenderorg/blender-foundation/history... In July 2002, Ton managed to get the NaN investors to agree on a unique Blender Foundation plan to attempt to open source Blender. The "Free Blender" campaign sought to raise 100,000 EUR, as a one-time fee so that the NaN investors would agree on open sourcing Blender. To everyone's shock and surprise the campaign reached the 100,000 EUR goal in only seven short weeks. On Sunday Oct 13, 2002, Blender was released to the world under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
cookiecaper 14y ago
Maybe it'd just be better to make it "source available" and allow licensees to modify and share the code freely amongst themselves, but not grant unlimited redistribution rights.
shocks 14y ago
If people want it without paying they will get it without paying anyway. I say open source it, but continue to sell licenses for it.
- streptomycin 14y ago
  You can already get it without paying for it, it just bugs you to buy a license every now and again.
  - shocks 14y ago
    Huh? That's besides the point. My point is that just because it's commercial software doesn't mean it should be closed source. If it was open source it could be 'easier to steal', but I bet most people seriously using it would still buy it. Anybody that took the time to patch the source would never have bought it anyway - so there is nothing lost. I'm not sure why I'm getting down voted. For a bunch of open source evangelists that's pretty hypocritical.
    - streptomycin 14y ago
      If it was open source it could be 'easier to steal' My point was that it's already freely available today. Just go to the site and download it. For a bunch of open source evangelists that's pretty hypocritical. wat? Two levels of wat, really. You think Hacker News readers are open source evangelists? And you think downvoting is hypocritical for open source evangelists?
pretoriusB 14y ago
>If ST becomes open-source, that solves one of the biggest issues many people have with ST, especially those coming from a vim/emacs background. And it makes ST another bloody Open Source project, designed by a community, to fall by the wayside and stagnate like Gnome, Emacs, Vim etc...
- edanm 14y ago
  I agree in some sense. But in another sense, people are still using vim/emacs 20+ years later. Not everyone, which is why I think a modern reboot of them is in order, but I don't think you can say the same for much commercial software from 30 years ago.
- mdellabitta 14y ago
  What are your definitions of 'wayside' and 'stagnate', exactly?
- deleted 14y ago
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- deleted 14y ago
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- rayiner 14y ago
  I'd imagine there are way more Emacs/Vim users than SublimeText users or even Textmate users at it's peak.
  - pretoriusB 14y ago
    Sure. The stagnation part was about becoming too slow to move forward. For example, with all it's lisp scripting capabilities and 30+ year history, Emacs is an early nineties editor UI, UX and codebase wise.
Shorel 14y ago
I disagree. One of the reasons it works so well is that it has a lot of code written in C++. With a very specific feature-set of C++, as all single programmer C++ codebases are. An opensource project would focus in the slower Python part as most open source developers hate C++ and swear by scripting languages. Or would go on countless religious wars about what specific subset of C++ should the project use. They would even waste a lot of time editing out perfectly valid preprocessor macros simply because 'macros are evil'. So far it has been proven to be better managed by its owner than it could have been by the community. Let the OSS people improve on Notepad++. You can even setup a Kickstarter for them, and it would be good enough for that project.
- streptomycin 14y ago
  Just because it's open source doesn't mean the community gets to directly decide features for the official release. The original developer would almost certainly be a Benevolent Dictator for Life. If some other people wanted to fork it and do stuff that you disagreed with, then you could respond simply by not using their fork.
- zerd 14y ago
  A closed source project (as it is as of right now) can ONLY focus on the "slower Python part", as it is the ONLY way of extending Sublime Text. I really can't see how open sourcing ST would make it slower. If I wanted to extend it in a way that is not supported in the Python API, I simply can't.
martinced 14y ago
First I'll point out that I'm open-minded and I'll try ST seen that so many people say good things about it. However I'm not sure that's one of the biggest issue from people coming from a vim/emacs background. I'm using Emacs because there is more than one million line of elisp code in Emacs and all its mode and there's no way anything is going to offer anywhere near close what Emacs has to offer. Just an example: you can search and replace on a regexp and use friggin' Lisp substitution in the replacement. Say I've got this: foo = 1 bar = 2 ... = . // 96 more lines come here baz = 99 I'm not saying it would be good style or anything to have "code" like that, but if I want to replace it with foo = 5 bar = 10 ... = . // 96 more lines come here baz = 495 Well.. This is trivial under Emacs. And it's not trivial because that particular use case has been thought of previously: it's trivial because search and replace can use Lisp substitution, which is wild. There are too many to names but I'm regularly using, under Emacs: real-time validation of XML files using Relax NG, ace-jump-mode, paredit (sweeter than sweet), magit, org-mode, etc. But, most importantly, instead of having to adapt myself to the "text editor", I can adapt the text editor to myself. Is ST3 as extensible as Emacs? How complicated would it be to, say, implement the equivalent of vim's easymotion / emacs' ace-jump-mode to ST3? I'm not asking if someone did it: I'm asking how "complicated" it is for one to be able to adapt his too the way he needs. I'll try ST, to see what the fuss is about...
- fusiongyro 14y ago
  The killer features that led me to TextMate and Sublime Text is that they open instantly and they render fonts nicely. I need the features you named a lot less than I need those two.
- edanm 14y ago
  Hi martinced, In general, ST is pretty easy to write plugins for, as its got a simple API and everything is in Python. It was so much easier that even I wrote plugins for it, back in the days of ST1. I've since written some vimscript, and, let's just say, it's nicer to use a "true" programming language like Python than vimscript. Here's what I think you should focus on with ST: Multiple Cursors. I've been beating the Multiple Cursors drum for a while, but a vast number of things can be done with them, and they're amazing. Many macros in emacs/vim can be done using Multiple Cursors, with the advantage that they usually work right the first time, and if you make mistakes, you get instant visual feedback so you can fix your mistake, instead of "record and pray" the way you do with vim/emacs. Seriously, Multiple Cursors are ST's killer feature, in my eyes. And for everything else, ST simply does all the things you want an editor to do well, and it does them beautifully, easily, and by default. If we do a vim/ST comparison, I'd say ST wins the "I just want to install something and get to work" battle (easily), vim wins the "I can be amazingly productive with the actual text editing" battle, but ST wins the "I want to do cool manipulations to lots of similar text" because of Multiple Cursors.

by edanm 14y ago

mattmanser 14y ago

Here's what I'd love someone to organize: A Kickstarter campaign to raise enough money to pay Microsoft to make Windows open-source. If Windows becomes open-source, that solves one of the biggest issues many people have with Windows, especially those coming from a Linux background. This is something I know I would pay for, and I believe others would as well.

pbreit 14y ago
Is that a reasonable comparison? No.
- theallan 14y ago
  Why not? Its the same principle just a question of scale.
  - arnarbi 14y ago
    That's a straw man argument. "Same, except for scale" alone does not make it a reasonable comparison.
  - petercooper 14y ago
    I tried that one on a gun nut with no luck. "If you think it's your right to own and carry a gun, then why don't you think North Korea should be allowed to have its own nukes?"
shanelja 14y ago
Here's what I'd love someone to organize: A Kickstarter campaign to raise enough money to pay The Government to make Everything Free. If Everything becomes free, that solves one of the biggest issues many people have with The Government, especially those coming from a Poor background. This is something I know I would pay for, and I believe others would as well. Anything sounds ridiculous at scale
- dkuntz2 14y ago
  It's called true socialism. It's a perfectly viable political system, provided it's correctly setup.
  - shanelja 14y ago
    Unfortunately, it's for the most part flawed as the correct setup you mention requires the human element to behave itself to maintain balance.
    - dkuntz2 14y ago
      I know. Hence the lack of true, pure socialist countries in the world today. It also requires a post-scarcity economy. Which, supposedly we could achieve if we worked towards it, but again, that human thing keeps us from doing that.
- pkulak 14y ago
  I think paying to open source SublimeText is a bit more ridiculous than paying the government. SublimeText is a license to print money at this point. It's the _default_ editor for just about every (non-bearded) engineer and costs $60 (soon, $70). The government, after all, is just a representation of its people. If the people want communism, then that's what happens.
  - wmboy 14y ago
    I'm not trying to validate the Kickstarter idea, but thought I'd add that making it open source doesn't mean they would have to stop selling it. WooThemes is an obvious example of a company that makes a heap of money selling open source software.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
edanm 14y ago
If you're suggesting that this won't work because the numbers don't make sense, then I think a better way to go about it is to do exactly what forrestthewoods did in another comment - talk about actual numbers. Much more convincing than making analogies which most people can dismiss pretty easily.

forrestthewoods 14y ago

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.

edanm 14y ago
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.
- 3amOpsGuy 14y ago
  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.
  - pretoriusB 14y ago
    >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).

davej 14y ago

Textmate 2 is open source now and I've been using it as my primary text editor for the last couple of months. It's become really solid and it's definitely worth a look (if you're on Mac).

Shorel 14y ago
I'm not on a Mac.
- Jgrubb 14y ago
  unless you.on_a_mac comment.does_not_apply

jzwinck 14y ago

Is there a precedent for making something that exists to become open source using KickStarter money? I proposed this very thing to KS once and they rejected me. But I don't know if they make these judgments by their perception of the product rather than the nature of the transaction.

streptomycin 14y ago
I don't know about KickStarter specifically, but the general concept has been used several times. Blender is probably the most notable example http://www.blender.org/blenderorg/blender-foundation/history/ http://www.blender.org/blenderorg/blender-foundation/history... In July 2002, Ton managed to get the NaN investors to agree on a unique Blender Foundation plan to attempt to open source Blender. The "Free Blender" campaign sought to raise 100,000 EUR, as a one-time fee so that the NaN investors would agree on open sourcing Blender. To everyone's shock and surprise the campaign reached the 100,000 EUR goal in only seven short weeks. On Sunday Oct 13, 2002, Blender was released to the world under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

cookiecaper 14y ago

Maybe it'd just be better to make it "source available" and allow licensees to modify and share the code freely amongst themselves, but not grant unlimited redistribution rights.

shocks 14y ago

If people want it without paying they will get it without paying anyway. I say open source it, but continue to sell licenses for it.

streptomycin 14y ago
You can already get it without paying for it, it just bugs you to buy a license every now and again.
- shocks 14y ago
  Huh? That's besides the point. My point is that just because it's commercial software doesn't mean it should be closed source. If it was open source it could be 'easier to steal', but I bet most people seriously using it would still buy it. Anybody that took the time to patch the source would never have bought it anyway - so there is nothing lost. I'm not sure why I'm getting down voted. For a bunch of open source evangelists that's pretty hypocritical.
  - streptomycin 14y ago
    If it was open source it could be 'easier to steal' My point was that it's already freely available today. Just go to the site and download it. For a bunch of open source evangelists that's pretty hypocritical. wat? Two levels of wat, really. You think Hacker News readers are open source evangelists? And you think downvoting is hypocritical for open source evangelists?

pretoriusB 14y ago

>If ST becomes open-source, that solves one of the biggest issues many people have with ST, especially those coming from a vim/emacs background. And it makes ST another bloody Open Source project, designed by a community, to fall by the wayside and stagnate like Gnome, Emacs, Vim etc...

edanm 14y ago
I agree in some sense. But in another sense, people are still using vim/emacs 20+ years later. Not everyone, which is why I think a modern reboot of them is in order, but I don't think you can say the same for much commercial software from 30 years ago.
mdellabitta 14y ago
What are your definitions of 'wayside' and 'stagnate', exactly?
deleted 14y ago
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deleted 14y ago
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rayiner 14y ago
I'd imagine there are way more Emacs/Vim users than SublimeText users or even Textmate users at it's peak.
- pretoriusB 14y ago
  Sure. The stagnation part was about becoming too slow to move forward. For example, with all it's lisp scripting capabilities and 30+ year history, Emacs is an early nineties editor UI, UX and codebase wise.

Shorel 14y ago

I disagree. One of the reasons it works so well is that it has a lot of code written in C++. With a very specific feature-set of C++, as all single programmer C++ codebases are. An opensource project would focus in the slower Python part as most open source developers hate C++ and swear by scripting languages. Or would go on countless religious wars about what specific subset of C++ should the project use. They would even waste a lot of time editing out perfectly valid preprocessor macros simply because 'macros are evil'. So far it has been proven to be better managed by its owner than it could have been by the community. Let the OSS people improve on Notepad++. You can even setup a Kickstarter for them, and it would be good enough for that project.

streptomycin 14y ago
Just because it's open source doesn't mean the community gets to directly decide features for the official release. The original developer would almost certainly be a Benevolent Dictator for Life. If some other people wanted to fork it and do stuff that you disagreed with, then you could respond simply by not using their fork.
zerd 14y ago
A closed source project (as it is as of right now) can ONLY focus on the "slower Python part", as it is the ONLY way of extending Sublime Text. I really can't see how open sourcing ST would make it slower. If I wanted to extend it in a way that is not supported in the Python API, I simply can't.

martinced 14y ago

First I'll point out that I'm open-minded and I'll try ST seen that so many people say good things about it. However I'm not sure that's one of the biggest issue from people coming from a vim/emacs background. I'm using Emacs because there is more than one million line of elisp code in Emacs and all its mode and there's no way anything is going to offer anywhere near close what Emacs has to offer. Just an example: you can search and replace on a regexp and use friggin' Lisp substitution in the replacement. Say I've got this: foo = 1 bar = 2 ... = . // 96 more lines come here baz = 99 I'm not saying it would be good style or anything to have "code" like that, but if I want to replace it with foo = 5 bar = 10 ... = . // 96 more lines come here baz = 495 Well.. This is trivial under Emacs. And it's not trivial because that particular use case has been thought of previously: it's trivial because search and replace can use Lisp substitution, which is wild. There are too many to names but I'm regularly using, under Emacs: real-time validation of XML files using Relax NG, ace-jump-mode, paredit (sweeter than sweet), magit, org-mode, etc. But, most importantly, instead of having to adapt myself to the "text editor", I can adapt the text editor to myself. Is ST3 as extensible as Emacs? How complicated would it be to, say, implement the equivalent of vim's easymotion / emacs' ace-jump-mode to ST3? I'm not asking if someone did it: I'm asking how "complicated" it is for one to be able to adapt his too the way he needs. I'll try ST, to see what the fuss is about...

fusiongyro 14y ago
The killer features that led me to TextMate and Sublime Text is that they open instantly and they render fonts nicely. I need the features you named a lot less than I need those two.
edanm 14y ago
Hi martinced, In general, ST is pretty easy to write plugins for, as its got a simple API and everything is in Python. It was so much easier that even I wrote plugins for it, back in the days of ST1. I've since written some vimscript, and, let's just say, it's nicer to use a "true" programming language like Python than vimscript. Here's what I think you should focus on with ST: Multiple Cursors. I've been beating the Multiple Cursors drum for a while, but a vast number of things can be done with them, and they're amazing. Many macros in emacs/vim can be done using Multiple Cursors, with the advantage that they usually work right the first time, and if you make mistakes, you get instant visual feedback so you can fix your mistake, instead of "record and pray" the way you do with vim/emacs. Seriously, Multiple Cursors are ST's killer feature, in my eyes. And for everything else, ST simply does all the things you want an editor to do well, and it does them beautifully, easily, and by default. If we do a vim/ST comparison, I'd say ST wins the "I just want to install something and get to work" battle (easily), vim wins the "I can be amazingly productive with the actual text editing" battle, but ST wins the "I want to do cool manipulations to lots of similar text" because of Multiple Cursors.