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Comment by scott_w | Hacker News Reader

It's not taboo - just observe the success of Visual Studio.

I think charging for tools does limit the potential user base of those tools. After all, why pay for an editor when vim is free? The same applies for a lot of development tools.

Another potential reason is that charging for something creates an expectation of quality and support. This attracts certain classes of user, but not everyone wants to provide this expectation. Giving the tool away for free helps absolve the developer of responsibility at a later date.

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There's another caveat. Just look at what happened to textmate, it was closed source many of us paid for it. The author decided to rebuild everything and we didn't get any real update for like three or four years. And yet we couldn't do anything about it. And yet it didn't met the community expectations.

Seriously, building a code editor is a massive amount of work, having it open means you'll find someone to help if you don't have a massive company like microsoft behind you.

Frankly TextMate met my expectations just fine and I don't regret paying for it.

> we didn't get any real update for like three or four years

Call me old-fashioned but I can't keep up with updating all my tools every few month. Maybe three four years is a bit too long but it's nice to have some period of stability. Despite not having major updates TextMate remained very popular. It must have gotten many things right from the very first release. I wish there were more products like that.

Well, there are things you can expect from a code editor, like not crashing or getting sluggish because you opened your logs. At least this issue was present when I left Textmate.

Besides that kind of details, Textmate is indeed a very well made product, that go t a lot of things right from the beginning as you said. But it's just sad to see it just "froze" as it is.

Anyway it's not really about an update frenzy, it's basically as it's not an open product but one we paid for, I expect them to polish it over time.

Agree with your comment. To elaborate a little bit:

> After all, why pay for an editor when vim is free?

Why develop a new editor if it's not gonna be better than vim?

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