[TxMt] Are there any plans to make TextMate free and open source?

[Allan Odgaard]

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 :)