TextMate 2 Open Sourced… Not Because of Apple
There's a lot of rumor going around right now that the developer of TextMate for the Mac decided to open source it because of Apple's restrictions.
This is, in a word, nonsense. Though to be fair, the developer even says as much:
The decision was not really the direct result of any particular action by Apple, but more "a long process of maturing, of opening up," according to Odgaard. "It took a bit of guts, too, because there’s a chance I could lose the revenue generated from it."
Apple's restrictions may still have something to do with it on some level, but let's be clear about the history of TextMate 2. TextMate was an awesome text editor for programmers for the Macintosh. It has been referred to as "the missing editor" and a variety of other good things over the years. They sold it for $50, and many people considered it a deal at that price.
Then version 1.5 came out in January 2006 and… they stopped updating it. Other than some bug fixes, development on TextMate simply stopped. The TextMate developer wanted to work more on a complete rewrite, TextMate 2, and while we got occasional status updates over time it started increasingly to be considered vaporware. Winning a vaporware award from Wired in 2009.
When TextMate 1 came out, it was one of the very few games in town (notably the collaborative SubEthaEdit and the then-clunky BBEdit) and one of the very few decent editors for the Mac. In the last six years, however, the competition has not been idle:
BBEdit, long a powerhouse of development (I used it back in college), was on version 8.7 in 2007. It was a clunky and in many ways felt like an outdated editor. They charged $125 for it. Recently version 10 came out, newly polished and much more modern, and they dropped the price to $50, right in line with TextMate's pricing.
Chocolat, Coda, Espresso, and several other native mac code and html editors have been published. Many of them quite good.
The well reviewed and cross platform Sublime Text 2 was brought to the mac.
Even emacs for the mac has seen some continual updates.
Some of these editors were aiming directly at TextMate's audience, offering enhancements beyond what TextMate could do or integrating directly with textmate's language extensions.
Meanwhile, in December and under increasing pressure, Macromates released an alpha version of 2.0.
Like many developers who were in the process of switching away to now-more-modern editors, I downloaded TextMate 2a and gave it a try. The result was… disappointing.
A few features were added… but rather than leapfrogging over the competition, TextMate 2 in many ways felt like a huge step backwards for me, among other issues:
The preference dialogs were painful and in some cases, such as for environment variables, flat didn't work with my configuration.
There were very few front end improvements that 1) were things I actually wanted and 2) were sufficiently not buggy for me to use them.
The number of bugs went up significantly. I frequently found it crashing and if I leave it running in the background it has a tendency to leak memory.
Memory consumption even without leaking anything feels excessive.
The tabbing system was modified and felt like a huge step backwards for anyone wrote in a language other than Java.
Updates were very slow in coming and, really, didn't seem to be fixing much.
So recently they decided to release it as open source under the GPL3 license while requesting any additions to the mainline be entered into the public domain . Basically what this means is that people can't build their own closed source forks to profit off of TextMate, but that the original author can still make his own for-profit releases using other people's work. I don't really mind this in principle, though I personally doubt I will be contributing to TextMate 2 I'll probably at least keep an eye on it.
From what is going on, it is pretty clear to me that the actual problem is not that Apple was proving too restrictive, but rather that the developer, while suffering from a second system effect, couldn't actually keep pace with the market on his own. He fell too far behind relative to the market, and so now is looking to try to stay competitive through the leveraging of the open source community.
