I'm sure that if he were to abandon Sublime, then he'd open source it. The community is too big not to. Besides, $60 is not a bad price for something that will always be ahead of Lime's curve.

$0 is not a bad price for something that will always be behind of Sublime's curve.

I used closed and open source software. It just feels much better if I see a bug, fix it, place a pull request and be done with it, than discuss with some devs in a bug tracker if and when they want to fix a bug I hate.

And that's the problem. Every single open source software looks like it was cobbled together with no vision or coherency in design.

It's no surprise that most open source software is clunky and hard to use whereas closed products always have that visual polish.

Yes, many projects lack a style guide for UI and/or coding.

And often big projects have, similar to closed source software, rather ugly workflows where you have to discuss stuff before you're assigned to a bug and then have to send it patches and what not.

A good review process is important or else everything ends in chaos.

    Closed products always have that visual polish

Wow. You must use different closed-source software to me. I agree a lot of open source software is very ad-hoc and seems to have no overarching design in place, but the same seems to be true of most closed source software in my experience.

Every single? You sure you want to make that claim on HN?

Yeah, take the go language, for instance. No vision, cobbled together by amateurs without any clear goals, and no real-world experience. Awful. /s

A lot of open/free projects are indeed "hobby" projects (and not in a good way) -- but to claim that all of them are bad? Compared to what? The shareware scene from the 90s?

> Every single open source software looks like it was cobbled together with no vision or coherency in design.

Creating a Pull Request doesn't mean that the developer of the open source project has to accept it verbatim if it doesn't fit with the 'vision.'

[Also, I'm pretty sure that the parent to your post was talking about bugs that probably don't involve visuals.]

> for something that will always be ahead of Lime's curve.

What makes you so sure of that?

In my experience, when a project starts out of the gate by riding on the success of another project, it never fully catches up. To me, it means the maintainers are not capable of creating something themselves that is their own. They will likely always rely on Sublime to come up with new features and ideas first, and then copy them.

That wasn't what they said. They said:

> At work that makes little difference to me.

Clearly implying that Open Source is a productivity increase. I am asking why.

I'd put what you're saying in the "warm fuzzy feeling" department as in the real world the majority of developers, even if Sublime Text died, would just sit by patiently and wait for someone else to release a replacement. Most lack the skills, time, or both to develop a project like Sublime Text.

> Clearly implying that Open Source is a productivity increase. I am asking why.

If something breaks or development stalls or he wants new features and the developer has abandoned the project he can then pick it up himself if he wants.

You just repeated what the person said above who I replied to. Repeating something doesn't add clarity and is not conducive to a conversation.

I read it as "At work, I'm happy to pay for software." and "I prefer to use open source software." as two separate thoughts.

That said, I agree that just because people can contribute to software doesn't mean they will. I'm certainly guilty of just living with bugs or functionality gaps in open source software that I use, lazily waiting for someone else to address it the same way I would if it were something developed privately.