Edit: I expected the downvote, but honestly believe that a discussion on this could be valuable. If you're going to downvote me, in return please tell me why you think this question shouldn't be asked.
"Sublime Text may be downloaded and evaluated for free, however a license must be purchased for continued use."
The developer could try to enforce this rule by building in DRM or by threatening legal action, but those things would make for a pretty crappy user experience. Instead, the author chose to do the right thing by users and provide an evaluation version with no restrictions.
Legally and technically, you can certainly use Sublime Text without paying for it. To me, though, using Sublime Text for your everyday work without paying for it is the ethical equivalent of using a cracked version of Photoshop.
Adobe's Photoshop license doesn't do anything like this. If you crack it, you're breaking the rules.
I think it's a gray area, but it's undeniably true that paying for a license is a respectful thing to do at the very least.
Sure you can use it for free, but if you use it everyday and earn money on the code you make using it, it would be a fine gesture to support the developer.
Because otherwise you're breaking the law, not to mention screwing whoever put in the hard work to create something you obviously find valuable.
You're breaking the law? No, you're not. On the download page it explicitly says "There is currently no enforced time limit for the evaluation."
Screwing them over? Ridiculous. They've explicitly given me permission to not pay them! I'd be doing them a favor if I paid them. I would be showing them a lot of respect. That is a good thing, but it is not inherently bad to accept their charity and use the software freely.
As far as I can tell, it's a clever business strategy for disseminating free software, with the hope that people will purchase it out of respect for the art. It's a clever business move because it gets the software out there in mass so that it becomes popular.
They shouldn't expect everyone to buy the software when they explicitly say they don't define a time limit in which one has to pay. I would bet that they even don't expect this.
So when i find a really nice piece of software that actually saved me a lot of money (by increasing productivity and reducing licensing cost of other dev tools), i don't mind paying them a 70$ one time fee.
Because in the end, they are not going to pay their employees with your respect.
So, you have all the right not to pay them, you also have the right to leave shitty tips all the time and to not go voting.
But i think i don't need to explain what will happen if we all act like that.
It's free to evaluate for as long as you'd like. Once you start seriously using it, and making money with it, you need to buy it.
The key words there are "for the evaluation". As soon as you're using the product for real, you are required to pay for it.
Screwing them over? Ridiculous. They've explicitly given me permission to not pay them!
No, they have given you permission not to pay them while you evaluate the product. After that, you are explicitly required to pay them if you want to use it for real work.