Hacker News Reader

Comment by jamesaguilar | Hacker News Reader

What's in it for him? Likely loss of his primary revenue stream and control over the project's destiny? It doesn't seem like a compelling move.

View on HN

Well, if his customers get frustrated and move to another platform, he may have won the battle but lost the war. This is exactly what happened to TextMate; development was fast, at first, but then it slowed to a crawl and ST took over the market. I love ST{2|3} and am a fully paid member and I don't find it lacking in any respect. However, bit rot is a very real phenomenon and projects that can't keep up with the times are doomed.

Besides, going open source doesn't mean that you lose the keys to the kingdom. There are plenty of open source projects that make money; Linus is gainfully employed and he gives everything away. I'm sure there are ways to monetize ST beyond charging for binaries.

I'd like to see a Kickstarter for it to be released to open source.

Trading a continual long term revenue source for a single one off payment, probably isn't very compelling.

The risk being that a slow development pace will allow Atom to eat ST's lunch. Then any future revenue falls off a cliff.

Use Kickstarter to open source it and you both cash in and do the community a favour.

Last I tried Atom it's quite a long way from offering any significant advantage over ST and has it's own risks due to not having a clear revenue model. If the ST devs believe that they can sell 100K licenses over say 5-10 years at $60 each then that sets the kickstarter goal in the region of $6M without offering any rewards for backers which seems like a pretty unrealistic target.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com