If you continue to use the evaluation copy after you're done evaluating it, nobody's going to stop you, but it is a little dishonest.
If you're an amateur (in the literal sense, not as an insult), then you might be more inclined to pirate it. I guess the developers are savvy enough to realise this, and just put a nag-screen in instead.
Bottom line, some people have the luxury of having such well-paid jobs that open source is a real possibility nowadays. But ST is likely someone's income/living, and shafting the devs isn't cool at all. If you're not happy with this, you can always make another editor, but it turns out to be fairly hard to do (see Atom).
Well, same goes for ST3. Just because it doesn't have agressive DRM and lockouts doesn't make it any more free.
I personally believe creators of software (music, games, other immaterial goods) should be compensated and rewarded fairly, and I gladly let them have their fair share.
At the same time, I find it ridiculous to pay for something that can be copied at no cost. The technology allows everything to be free, but we force an emulation of physical goods onto the digital world, so we don't have to change the way or society works. We use the legal system to enforce this.
I haven't found a way to reconcile these two views yet, this is a major unsolved problem in our society. I believe a solution would need a radical change in how our economy works.
But in the meanwhile, I have no moral problem to "pirate" stuff when I can't afford it or think it is to expensive.
Acrobat Pro? Photoshop? As rarely as I need it and as expensive as it is: Free. MS Office: has become to cumbersome to pirate, costs. Sublime Text? I like the product and want the Indy developer to succeed, so costs, too.
I'm not sure what your difficulty is. There's almost no cost to create a copy, but creating the original has many costs. Since no one is going to pay for creating the original upfront, the developer asks people to pay for the copies, and legal protections ensure that's possible.
Reminds me of an episode of West Wing that discusses the cost of pharaceuticals:
"Why do they charge $100 for a pill that costs $1 to make?"
"Because the first pill cost $100,000,000 to make."
Just let us pull the wool over our own eyes, please.
Pause for a moment and reflect on the few posts above. It feels really weird to conflate in the same breath the entertainment industry and healthcare. I don't believe it's a given that the same standards should apply to both, but the topic flows like it's just that (and I vaguely remember it being about a text-editor, once ... ;) ).
So, entertainment and some perspective on the status quo; It's been roughly half a century since the entertainment/media/content distribution industry has been growing into a very powerful political lobby, pushing for more stronger enforcement of intellectual property rights in the face of changing information technologies.
Some person who doesn't know any better might think, "Hey wait what, artists holding political power? That sounds like one of those crazy counter-culture TAZ-type pipe dreams, I always wondered what would happen if that would actually come to happen ..." -- except of course it didn't because it's not the artists, it's the middle-men that hold nearly all the power -- I'm not that person btw, nor saying I want artists to rule the world ;) Just painting a silly picture to show what intellectual property rights on the surface seem to do (protecting content-creators) but in addition shifting a disproportionally large amount of power completely elsewhere ("rightsholders", "the content industry", "big media", middle-men, etc).
Now here comes the magic trick. Enforcing IP rights, tightening the laws, going after pirates, DRM, all that stuff the content industry is lobbying for, apart from generic "control", what does it really accomplish? It basically tries to make intellectual property into a fungible good. That's what it does. But you can rule and legislate all you want, that doesn't make it so. All that's happened is that you've ruled and legislated it so that people must act (and pretend) that intellectual property is a fungible good. Carefully worded legislation to change a fundamental aspect of reality, it's the closest thing to a magic spell you'll see.
Imagine the other way around, imagine a "free and open matter lobby" decreeing that bananas should no longer be considered a fungible good and that anyone should be able to copy bananas freely. Carefully worded legislation tip-toes around the insanity of this idea, in a way that makes it illegal to commercially differentiate between an "original banana" and its copies, or that copies of a banana are somehow less nutritious than the supposed "original", regardless of the medium they're copied on--instead the big players in the industry advertise their bananas as being intrinsically "more copyable" than the competition (whose bananas are rumoured to come from a "master copy", which is an atrocious lie, as it is illegal to keep track).
If only we could liberate more fruit, we might solve world hunger and in particular we could feed all the starving artists. Maybe next century!
There is no separate shareware version. What makes Sublime unique is that it never stops working; it's evaluation period is open, and treats the user as an adult to do the right and legal thing.
I do get mad when people don't give them money since I really appreciate the model.
It's great that Sublime doesn't have strong DRM, but using the free version indefinitely is just as wrong as using a cracked version of Photoshop, IMHO.
I do care about my fellow developer who wrote ST and seems a nice guy, which is a reason to pay... So maybe I'm not a sociopath after all.
And as someone running a business, it is a significant and unnecessary liability to use pirated or unlicensed software.