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Comment by empyrical | Hacker News Reader

I really hope Sublime goes open source someday

I really hope people start paying more for software someday.

Open source != no cost of distribution: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html

I work with someone who has gotten me thinking a lot more about what software I do and don't pay for. He pays for any software he uses "daily". The payments are either donations to open source projects, service fees, or software purchases.

In reality there would be a CentOS and everyone would use that instead.

Although this would not be much of a change for Sublime in particular, which is commercial with purchase optional (just occasional nagging.)

I paid for Sublime - it's my favourite editor by far. There are ways for companies to support themselves while having their offering be open source though. And I think Sublime might need to eventually to compete

OpenSource often means easy to use without paying. It gives you choice to use but not pay. I am not against open source but most of the time people religiously screaming that this and that must be open source are the ones that never pay for software.

Oh and also replying to the guy above. Tell that to dozens of OSS tools that had to be supported by real companies because people were not that willing to donate. Look at grsecurity for example, tmux, and the other ones i do not remember that Stripe donated 100k to.

There is a way, selling support. Do you really see people paying for commercial support of Sublime?

>There is a way, selling support

Which gives you the incentive to make the software less user friendly so more people pay for support :)

Open source makes a lot of sense for things developers use in common (i.e. language runtimes, compilers, libraries, etc.) because they can all "give back." This is entirely consistent with developers selling application-specific software to other people.

There's no contradiction between the two.

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