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Comment by ceronman | Hacker News Reader

I love this editor and it makes me sad to see how the project is stalled.

In 2002 the investors behind Blender launched the "Free Blender" campaign. They asked for 100,000 EUR as a one-time fee for open sourcing it. At the time the project was dying as a proprietary product. The investors got the money and today Blender is a healthy open source project.

I would love to see something similar with Sublime Text. The author seems uninterested in continuing with its development while many users want to see it moving forward. I believe it can raise much more money than Blender at the time.

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I'd like to see Jon sign up for something like Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/

As near as I can tell, they would qualify as a creator, the signup process is fast and easy, and with Sublime's massive user community, it would probably give them a nice little revenue stream on the side. Patreon seems like a good way to extract money on a regular basis from people who actively want to give it to you. One of the webcomics I follow daily, Questionable Content, is currently pulling down $9,000+/month from Patreon support alone: http://www.patreon.com/jephjacques (HUGE as webcomic revenue usually goes).

I'd pledge like $10/month just to get regular monthly software updates. Hell, I'd pay $5/month just for regular monthly blog updates on he's been working on, and there'd be absolutely zero downside to his writing a blog update once a month.

Stalled? I can't understand why people has this perception. You're not the only one; SublimeHQ forums are full of people complaining that "Sublime project is dead".

The guy releases a new version almost every month. He doesn't talk much, but keeps chugging along, fixing bugs and releasing incremental functionality every month or two.

True, it is still beta. But so what? ST3 has been incredibly stable since the first version, and all beta versions are a free upgrade to all ST2 licensed users till it is out of beta.

Plus, if you're really missing any functionality, just go ahead and develop a plugin. It's easy, and you don't need to open source the entire editor for that.

I think we should give the author a break. He built one of the best editors out there, and I really hope he can make a living out of this product, in whatever way he can.

What are you talking about? Jon hasn't released anything since the end of 2013...

A lot of ST users are former Textmate users, too. So we've certainly been through this rigamarole before.

Textmate 2 did exactly what Blender did. Went open source, has a healthy developer community, and has had steady updates for a couple of years. They still call it "Alpha" but it is very stable and I use it every day.

Wow, I somehow missed (or forgot?) that TextMate 2 got open sourced. Here is the Github repo: https://github.com/textmate/textmate

True, but before Textmate was open-sourced, there was a long period of frustration due to lack of progress and communication from the developer.

Yes, but Textmate 2, after all this time, has less options and is slower than ST2, much less ST3.

>I love this editor and it makes me sad to see how the project is stalled.

Stalled? It just had an update.

It's also in the 3rd version, under development, which came just a couple of months after the 2nd version had been released. He could just have released ST2 and keep it at that version for 3-4 years.

Instead he immediately started development ST3, which had frenetic development in the first months, and has been completely stable for a year or more (I know, I use it everyday, along with several plugins).

And in the forum he even mentioned ST4 base libs he is preparing a month or so ago.

> And in the forum he even mentioned ST4 base libs he is preparing a month or so ago.

Huh. Do you think there will be an ST4 beta/dev release before there's an ST3 stable release? I wonder if the developer has just decided to label all his releases beta from now on?

> and has been completely stable for a year or more

If this is true, why are the releases still labelled 'dev' releases?

How is anyone supposed to know that it's actually a stable release they should be using? Research it on HN comment threads?

>If this is true, why are the releases still labelled 'dev' releases?

Because it's an arbitrary label.

Or because John wants to hook something additional up or polish something before giving it his "3.0" blessing.

Or because it crashes on Linux and needs to fix that too...

But not because there's any issue with it on OS X, at least not for me, and I'm a heavy (8-10 hours per day) user.

Or because other people in this thread insist that in fact it's not stable, and there are numerous bugs on multiple platforms.

Regardless, if you want people to know that a release is ready for use by people who want a stable release, you label it a final release, right? Presumably the developer(s) do not believe it is ready for wide use. Whether they are being overly conservative or not is I suppose another question.

But it seems silly to suggest that everyone should do research on their own to discover something labelled 'beta' or 'dev' should really be considered the latest stable release.

>Or because other people in this thread insist that in fact it's not stable, and there are numerous bugs on multiple platforms.

I don't know what plugins those people use. They might have thrown in the kitchen sink of unstable plugins. Lots of people using ST3 in the forums without issues. Plus I know my personal experience on my platform of choice.

>Regardless, if you want people to know that a release is ready for use by people who want a stable release, you label it a final release, right?

Well, some projects prefer the perpetual beta designation. Heck, even Google did that for years for stuff like Gmail etc.

the dev releases are hidden on the website. You have to look to find them. The website by default directs you to the very stable 2 version. If you look you can find the stable 3 builds. If you dig deeper you can find the dev builds. Each of these things is clearly labeled and not mixed. Nobody going through the website is going to download a dev build on accident.

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