It seems to me a pretty realistic estimate that Jon is doing rather well off of Sublime Text nowadays. However, he's been working on it for over 8 years. I've gotten the impression that some of the early times were very lean and he took on contracts to keep it going. So why should he give up the resources that he justly earned? He worked his butt off, likely made lots of personal sacrifices, and now he should open source it once he's built a solid product that lots of people love?

Ok, so let's say you don't buy the angle that he deserves the success he's had. Do you think Sublime Text's success is a coincidence? Jon is a single engineer who's built pretty much every aspect of it, from a custom cross-platform UI that doesn't suck, to a custom editor control, more recently a parallel custom regex engine to make syntax highlighting faster and more robust. He's taken performance seriously from day one.

By contrast, Atom started development in 2008 and had a team of engineers working on it. It has more community involvement and bells and whistles, but still seems a bit behind in performance.

I would argue that Jon and his priorities and decisions are one of the biggest reasons Sublime Text has been successful. Would open sourcing it help Jon keep up the focus and insight he has shown in the past? Or, would it likely take up a large amount of his time?

I don't have an insight that anyone else doesn't have. And I could be completely wrong, but I feel like if open source would ensure a better product, Lime would have taken off. Or there would be other, strong, cross-platform text editors written in desktop technologies.

Literally, the difference between open source and proprietary is the license... nothing more.

There are plenty examples of excellent open source software, so I fail to see your argument on this. Proprietary ≠ better that open source.

There are plenty of great open source text editors, but Sublime happens to be leading the pack. It just so happens to be proprietary. I don't think that this is the sole reason for its success. The coder behind the project is evidently extremely gifted, he values his time and you're right, it is his choice to decide the license. I'm merely making the point that if Sublime Text was open sourced, it needn't spell the end of the line. I dare say it could pocket Jon a tidy sum, if it were kickstarter'd for say... £5,000,000? I know there are a LOT of coders out there who would splash out, in order to make this happen.

It's pretty much donationware as it stands, and it could still continue to use this method as a source of income, even if the license became permissive.

I think one of the main differences between Atom and Sublime is performance, and that is largely down to the technology stacks in use.

Well, how did you approach him? Did you ask him what kind of monetary figure it would take for him to consider open sourcing it? Or did you just ask him if he'd open source it for a crowdfunding effort?

In his mind, he may be thinking "crowdsourcing? Why would I give you my baby for $20k"

If I were in his shoes, I wouldn't in my wildest dreams expect that someone asking me about kickstarter would be in talking about the 7 figure range.

I don't think open source ensures a better product. I think open source can make a good project better, but you still need competent leadership

Indeed, an open source license does not ensure a better quality of product, and nor does a proprietary one. Free/Libre Open source software gives users various freedoms, which many people like (myself included). It also opens the door to a wide community of hackers, to help improve upon and speed up development.

If Linux remained the sole project of Linus, it would be nowhere near as effective as it is being out in the open, so to speak.