Shit, I use vim. If you're so screwed for cash there are a couple of first class alternatives.

EDIT: I use a macbook too. I think it's a great dev platform. It only represents about 5% of my yearly income, though. I doubt I'd be using it if it were costing me 20% of my yearly income.

Call me a "cheapskate" if you will, but there's no way I'd pay $60 USD for a text editor with the promise of a free upgrade, and then pay $60 again when the seller decided to renege on that promise.

You make a lot of money. Good for you. Feel free to donate however much you believe appropriate to whatever businesses you'd like but please keep your value judgments about the rest of us to yourself.

Well, then you're probably not paying for your own licenses either. Ask your company dept to put in for a license.

>The macbook I use cost about the same as my current monthly salary. You make a lot of money. Good for you.

Well, then that means that it represents 8% of your yearly income instead of my 5%.

I live in Canada; I suspect my cost of living is higher than yours. Blah, blah, etc. What'shisface lives in an expensive country and he doesn't have an effective way to segment the market so you can get a discount.

The point just is that what'shisface made a mistake and considering the role the tool has in your workflow that it's reasonable for him to renegue on his 6 year old promise just so he can keep putting food on his table and continue to produce more updates.

They're run like a business, not a charity, so I'm sure they'll be thrilled to support a fellow business reneging on an inconvenient contract.

I can’t help feeling that, if you weren’t satisfied with TM1 to some reasonable amount, you wouldn’t have been prepared to pay the original $60 for it. So you must have be relatively satisfied. Or have you been using TM1 under sufferance all these years or not using it at all but effectively just made an early purchase of TM2. Neither of those seem particularly likely to me.

And how the concept of "charity" is relevant to paying customers of a product, I do not understand.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSx86

I'm not trying to be pedantic here. Both of the above are commonplace in China, for example.

If you're taking the hardline "business is business" angle, then he should be held to his earlier promise as a business.

Most of the people I know got their macbooks by giving up a large chunk of their salary (some people earn less than its price). But they bought it anyway since its a solid development platform (and they wanted to venture into the iOS platform). Some gave up a large chunk of their scholarship. Some got it from their company and some bought it second hand from someone going abroad and wanted to shed some wait so sold it at a very small price. Almost no one was very comfortable paying the price of the first license since 60$ was a lot of money (even more so back then) but they thought it will pay out in the long term. They already feel cheated that they had to wait more than a few years for the next update. But it was a good tool none the less.

>Dude's running a business, not a charity.

Yes, exactly. So at the least you gather that. When MS or Apple says something related to license they do it. Apple recently told new customers don't wait till the next OSX upgrade to buy your new macbook, buy it now and we would give you an upgrade free of cost. And they did exactly that. How is this promise different. If he made a mistake in calculating initial cost, its his mistake and he has to own up to it. Why punish the customers? Not everybody who develops on a macbook lives in a first world country. You have a sick elitist mentality.

Edit:

PS:

>Bro, c'mon now

I have been on and off for a while,I missed when Jersey Shore hit HN.

I understand all of this.

You still don't need to use Textmate. I've never used textmate; I'm a professional developer.

>How is this promise different. If he made a mistake in calculating initial cost, its his mistake and he has to own up to it.

He's a one man operation. The risks are different, and he's likelier to go bankrupt. What-I'm-saying-here is… that I would have an exceedingly easy time forgiving him.

All of this is assuming he will own up to it. He posts a blog post grovelling to his customers and apologizing to everyone in sight, blah blah.

>I have been on and off for a while,I missed when Jersey Shore hit HN.

Stop being a jackass.

FYI, you're being "elitist" because you're implying that someone who watches Jersey Shore is beneath HN.

>(hope you get hellbanned, I sincerely do)

Isn't that a little bit shitty of you to say? You know, I kind of hate this about HN. Secret bans, unexplained rules, etc etc. Everyone worships to the entrepreneur ideal but I'm not convinced most people have had to think about operating as a business.

Shoot yourself in the foot much?

Stop whining about the purcheses you make. If you can pay for a mac more than your salary, you sure as hell can pay for $100 for a text-editor.

I have some really nice snake oil here for you, only $199! With a promise you will get another batch in 10 years for now!

So everyone should give him more money than he originally agreed to take to provide a product? Sounds like an, uh, donation.

Underwater on your mortgage? Foreclose it.

If I were a textmate user I would be looking at alternatives that actually deliver updates in a timely manner and don't break promises.

You agree to a contact and now you want to back out of it. Yes, people break contacts all the time but be prepare for a shit storm that will rip you apart.

No, you won't, because unless you're a lawyer even thinking about it for too long will be more expensive than the license in the first place.

This happens a LOT.

Your client doesn't pay within 90 days. Do you automatically sue them? No. Do you refuse to work with them in the future? It depends; if you automatically rejected every client who breaks the contract by not paying exactly on time you probably would run out of clients very quickly.

You need to be in the hole for something like $50,000 before it's worth the money involved in suing someone. So most of the time people cut deals and work something out.

Let's suppose you're underwater on your mortgage.

It's hell on your credit rating, but if it's not your DREAM HOUSE you'd be stupid to stick with the loan.

Let's suppose you bid on a construction project, but a machine somewhere broke and you can't afford to replace it. Finishing the bid will make you go bankrupt; it's more rational to break the contract.

"break your contract"? Arbitrary contract? Unless we're talking trivial sized businesses here, there is a non-trivial chance that I will take you to court over that.

Oh yeah, and it is my impression that going to the BBB is free, so you can be sure I'll be doing that regardless.

Then there’s the fact that this promise Allan made probably wasn’t even properly contractually codified.

He shouldn't have made the promise in the first place, but now that he has the only responsible thing to do is to fulfill that. He can say it was a bad idea, and ask for donations if he wants, but he shouldn't go back on his word. His fuckup, he's the one that has to deal with the consequences.

The consequence is going bankrupt or not going bankrupt.

>His fuckup, he's the one that has to deal with the consequences.

I honestly don't understand how this gets people so riled up. Sure, you have the right to your own opinion.

I'd get it if it cost $600. If you're a professional developer in North America though, $60 is a damn pittance.

It also has nothing to do with the amount.

Next to the 'buy' button in 2005 there was text along the lines of "upgrades are free all the way to 2.0". Changing that now, added to the fact that we were all expecting much needed updates in 2008, is just a dick move. It (further) damages any confidence the community had in TextMate.

The fact that I would gladly pay $200 for my dream editor (even though I've already paid for TM1 and ST2, I'm lucky that this would be a practical purchase for me) is just not relevant. As you say, he is running a business. A business that made a promise about what buying the product would get you. End of story.

If I buy a car that has a big sign: "FREE WINTER TIRES", and 6 years later I'm still not seeing those friggen tires, does the fact that I can afford to just buy them make the dealership any less shady?

IF Textmate ships (don't hold you breath), and IF it has compelling enough new (and fixed) features that are above and beyond the various (free) plugins and other text editors on Mac (including BBedit, Coda and Sublime 2) then I'll gladly pay.

Around 2 years ago, I bought a used, slightly beat-up, but perfectly functional MacBook for about US$400. I bought it as a backup, but it'd make a perfectly serviceable primary machine, too.

There are currently some closer to $350 on ebay under "buy it now", and you might be able to get lucky and pick one up even cheaper with normal bidding. There are also Intel iMacs up for under $350.

Had the post been just his own offer of support and words of encouragement it would have been quite nice, but instead it ended up being a bit irritating to me.

Why do you think you know better what other people want or don't want to do?

The fact is that Odgaard has many more lucrative options open to him than living up to an unfavorable pricing commitment from 6 years ago.

Meanwhile, your own interests are poorly served by telling him to shove it and watch you switch to Sublime Text. At least if Odgaard can be happy building TM2, you have a choice. But sticking to your sense of entitlement actually wins you nothing.

Building commercial products that serve programmers is a risky and painful proposition for the same reason that there isn't a lucrative business to be build selling ice to Inuits. Consider carefully that Odgaard is in no way captive to your judgment. If he himself was more rational, he'd drop TM2 today and start building iPhone apps for many times more money than anyone is ever going to pay him for a text editor.

It's absolutely mundane to have more desirable options than honoring prior commitments. This is true in business, in friendship and even in love. If this weren't the case what would the rational be for people to make commitments and hold each other to them? Surely you can see that there are ideals beyond being "more rational" and breaking one's word at any point it becomes inconvenient?

And if keeping your word is going to kill, don't write stuff like "ohlala im so poor damn what im gonna do! damn if only people would agree to pay!" and hope that it works.

You man up and you apologize properly, saying it ain't going to be free and that wasn't planned, but it has to be.

Going through the foggy FUD before announcing that (if ever announced of course) would be pretty low on my scale.

Time to use your mod down points :-)

Oh I agree. But this would be very easy to do tactfully, and so I consider it semi trivial. All you have to do is be humble, and apologize profusely and talk about the soul-consuming labour of love the project has been over the past few years and I think most people would forgive him.