On 28/08/2005, at 12.13, Kris Khaira wrote:
Are there any plans to make TextMate free and open source?
There are no short term plans of making it F/OSS. It would be cool to have it free (as in speech, not beer) in the future, but currently there are too many reasons not to.
[...] I'm suggesting this because it might actually improve TextMate without incurring a loss on its developers.
If you're actually advocating free as in beer, then the loss is inevitable. I have no idea what business model you have in mind that involves making money off of popularity. Donations doesn't work for software (as has been shown time after time), I can't make money from Google Ads (ask around), and I have no idea what technical support you refer to -- and would you really like to see me do technical support rather than work on the TextMate code base?
As for the improvements, at present I think these would only be marginal, and I'd have to spend time supervising “external” development -- plugins is the better route for allowing other developers to improve TM.
Contributing to a project like TM is not like fixing typos in a book. I'm curious, are you involved in any F/OSS project(s) yourself?
And after Mozilla Firefox's success, I believe that anything is possible.
They get funded by Netscape, IBM, Novell and many other industry players who have strong interests in seeing a standards compliant browser/alternative to MS/IE. So I don't think you can extrapolate anything from the Firefox success and contribute that to it being F/OSS.
There are btw several F/OSS text editor projects for the Mac :)