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Comment by evv | Hacker News Reader

I see the author, jskinner, is hanging out on this thread!

Have you ever considered open-sourcing SLT? This is your only route to immortalize this amazing piece of software. I'm sure you'd receive immense community contributions and widespread support. If you switch to a donation model + enterprise support plans, I think you're likely to earn greatly more than you currently do.

I love SLT and have used it throughout my career, but I still feel more comfortable depending on Atom because I know it will be supported by the community in the event that something bad happens with the ownership. If you don't open-source SLT, I sadly believe that open alternatives like Atom will outlive it.

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>I know it will be supported by the community

They won't. Projects like Atom and VSCode thrives because they have big companies behind them. Remove them - and the project will die.

There are tons of abandoned text editors on GiHub.

If I were in his shoes, I would open-source the project once I decided I wanted to stop working on it, or when I feel I've made enough, or have it baked into my will to open source the project if the truly unfortunate happens.

Of course, with a team backing the project that changes the dynamic a bit

Sometimes I wonder why there isn't a model, where its Author put up after Number of Copies sold, it will be open sourced.

Of Coz it wont be a small amount. It could be 25,000 copies. But then lot of companies, whom may like Sublime, could spend and join the race.

If you spend years taking the risk and building a piece of software; why give it away once it's successful?

Blender sorta did that. It was a closed source project that the authors said they would open source if the community raised €100,000. It succeeded and the software was subsequently made open source.

It doesn't even have to be proper open source - just source open! Just dump the source and say people may not sell it, but they may study it and contribute back.

You're not loosing any income - honest people will continue to buy the license, and those who are not honest or cannot afford it will continue to not buy a license. But people will be put at ease about the bus factor. We will learn a lot about how to produce a snappy app with a multiplatform toolkit. And I'm sure people will contribute back great features.

I guess many people won't contribute then.

The lack of Open Source is my struggle too. I really want to use it, but I want to be able to browse the code.

Atom will die with Electron in a not so distant future.

"If you switch to a donation model + enterprise support plans, I think you're likely to earn greatly more than you currently do."

I'm curious as to what your evidence to back this statement up is. As is, most donation-ware ends up getting next to nothing in donations.

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