This may be the pain of trying to sell software to developers. There are a lot of "open source enthusiasts" who don't do any more programming than simple shell

This may be the pain of trying to sell software to developers. There are a lot of "open source enthusiasts" who don't do any more programming than simple shell scripts, and while they appreciate the philosophy of "if the project doesn't have the feature you want you can just add it," in practice they can't just add it. (Unless it can be added through a simple script, which -- ironically in this case -- you can do pretty well with a lot of closed source editors.) The flip side, of course, is that only a limited number of developers can afford the time to write a full-featured programmers' editor with no expectation of recompense. That's not trivial stuff. There are an awful lot of free editors out there, but most of them end up being relatively feature-limited and, at best, "cult hits." Even getting to that point takes years. (And, while I hope this won't seem too cynical, the pain points Lime's developer describes as his motivation don't strike me as coming from Sublime Text's status as closed source. They strike me as coming from its status as a one-person project. A one-person open source project is theoretically better than a one-person closed source project, but...)