On 2009-June-14 , at 17:53 , Scott Haneda wrote:
There are a good deal of comments on the blog as well as reddit about the no pay for version 2 issue. I am more or less in the camp of "charge for version 2", especially if the lack of a charge is in any way adding to a lack of motivation to get 2 out the door.
I also think hard work should be rewarded and TM 2.0 seems to have been hard in the making. Yet, if I recall correctly, Allan said that he did not feel like charging for TM 2 because, in his mind, TM 2 will be what TM 1 really should have been (it was in a Q&A after a talk at C4). So, in a way, all of us who paid for a finished product, "already paid" for TM 2. This is very noble of him and quite humbling when you see how good TM 1 already is, despite the rough edges.
Of course Allan's financial situation might have changed (2 years is a long time) but if he still feels like he can live out of the new purchases, I think there is another hard work that's essential and could be rewarded with the money everyone seems ready to spend. TM is great because of its bundles and there's been a healthy, hard-working and productive open-source community built around those. I think bundle developers typically did not expect money in return for their work. But TM is not free software and since there is money involved, it would seem fair that those deserving people get their share too. I don't know which form that could take. It could be a donation page where every one chooses which bundles (s)he wants to give money to, or Alllan picking the bundles he sees as most active and most used. It would be even nicer if it could bring some value back to TextMate, like, for example, employing Michael Sheets part or full time to manage the bundles (if that is not already the case). Or paying some bounties for the development of specific features in bundles, the polishing of what potentially unexperienced bundles developers produced, the unification of some behaviors across bundles etc.
Anyway, that's just an idea and Allan has probably thought about that before. I just wanted to take this opportunity to acknowledge the work of all those people working around but outside of TextMate and maybe get the ball rolling in their direction.
PS: for full disclosure, I am subscribed to TextMate dev, committed a few things here and there, and improved the Fortran bundle. But I don't consider myself a bundle developer at all. There are plenty of other people that devoted much more of their time to make some great bundles.
JiHO --- http://jo.irisson.free.fr/