Jetbrains seem to be making quite a lot of money from the IDEA series. Shill, really? I have nothing against Sublime charging money, the only reason I'm not buying it is that it's not a good enough editor (for me!).

What I'm saying is that if he opens at least some of Sublime it might help make it a better editor and advance faster with the help of a community. It certainly beats Sublime becoming irrelevant and dying eventually, which I really hope it won't. I'd really prefer using sublime, but I'm simply using the best tool (BTW Sublime is still a better editor, no plugins installed on either). Open source is a plus for me, not a must.

ST becoming open-source is one thing, making it freemium another. I was talking about the latter.

Does freemium really work at all for anyone? Gets you new users quickly but then 1 in 10,000 converts. This works for established companies as they can weather the freeloaders with piles of cash from other parts of the business. Or in the case of VC-backed companies, from the money fountain (better not ask Spotify about that though).

I just can't see how a small company depending on a single product would benefit from this model.

For IDEs there's a clear path here - for a company, even a small startup, <$100 per developer is really no biggie, even if no private person would pay that. I used to pay for PyCharm (via my employer) when I worked mainly in Python because I needed the extra features.

BTW Sublime are more or less Freemium right now, even worse - you don't HAVE to pay, you just get those annoying messages. It's practically a donation model right now.