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Comment by samueloph | Hacker News Reader

imagine living in a world where a good software like sublime text was free software...

i know i know, to monetize selling free software is impossible (when people say they're monetizing selling free software they're actually selling services related to that free software, not the software itself), but one can dream...

edit-> some people are confusing the term "free software", i'd like to clarify that i mean free as in free speech, not free as in free beer.

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I honestly don't see any reason for Sublime Text to ever be more free than it is. The unlicensed version works as well as the paid version. The only real usability difference is that it asks you about a license every so often. If that reminder starts to annoy you it likely indicates that you are using ST often enough that you should pay for it.

I don't understand why so many developers are willing to pay thousands to upgrade their hardware frequently, but then aren't willing to pay $80 (or $30 to upgrade) once every what, 5 years?, for software that they use in the realm of 30+hrs per week. Sublime text has easily saved me enough time to earn that back.

it's not that i ain't willing to pay for its license, its that i prefer it to be free software (the problem is that being free software they'll have to change a lot of things to monetize as much as if it isn't).

about the reasons to be "more free" (as in free spech): collaborative development

OP means free as in speech as opposed to free as in beer. He would like the source to be available and to have the freedom to alter or redistribute it.

Sublime is clearly worth the money, but I've been burned dozens of times by non-open-source software suddenly changing business models or getting bought out and then sundowned. On a longer timescale, it seems that open source is the only way to really keep software alive. I wouldn't be surprised if Emacs (or even Atom) outlived every commercial competitor in the field, including all the ones by the big players. And this is especially important with tools you use for your work!

I wish we had a way of collectively and continuously funding open source software. Developers absolutely need to be paid, but it seems that software is better off when it's free.

(With that said, Sublime is one of the few remaining non-open-source applications that I'm more than happy to buy.)

Asking to buy is totally ok, but it also annoys the user by constant reminders that there is a newer version. And you cannot disable that.

Isn't this exactly what JetBrains does with IntelliJ? The core is open source and more than enough for most users. I loved the tool so much, don't touch 90% of the features, but shell out money every month for the Ultimate license because great software is expensive to develop.

Given the value to cost ratio, Sublime Text is essentially free. It costs about as much as most developers make in an hour or two. (Though I suspect if it was a large company it'd be a monthly subscription with cloud syncing and blah blah blah)

sorry, i mean free software as in free speech (eg: GPL), not free of charge

There is no need to imagine. Emacs, Vim, Atom, Notepad++, etc. are all free software.

I think we are supposing that electron apps aren't good software. But yes, emacs and vim still exist.

I use vim and atom, but most of my fellow developers don't want to use atom because it's heavy and slower than st, vim and emacs are out of question for them i think because things like the amount of work needed to prepare all the plugins to get the same functionality as the other tools.

Did you know that there are rich distributions that have done that for you? You can literally install those with a few simple steps and have fully functional super environment.

Key words for Google search: Emacs Prelude, or Spacemacs

Didn't know that, thanks!

TODO: search for vim equivalents

Neovim has some good documentation on how to get started. Also, spacemacs has vim bindings if you wish, afaik.

Spacevim, vim-bootstrap, spf13, janus, vim-sensible (for sensible defaults for vim only).

I have nothing but good to say about Sublime Text. I love it. I bought a license for it. It's great.

But.

Its slow progress over the last few years reminded me of the risks of trusting proprietary software for my main work tools - especially when that software has a very low bus factor. That doesn't mean I won't use closed software or that I dislike the authors or anything, but that if I'm going to invest hundreds of hours into solidly learning and customizing something, I want to have faith that it's not going anywhere. That's why I waved a sad goodbye to the otherwise excellent Sublime Text and went back to [open source editor].

yeah, my hope is that eventually they'll release it as free software. I'd be happy to donate at that point.

There are so many free alternatives.

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