I wouldn't argue that its "clever". Its a direct and honest way of asking people to pay for Sublime Text.
I'm happy to pay Jon as long as he keeps cranking out fast, high-quality software. Think of it as a subscription where you still own the software if you want to get out of it.
It's not a direct and honest way of asking people to pay for Sublime Text - it's an indirect way of asking people to continue to pay for something they thought they'd already bought.
I paid for Sublime Text 2 with the expectation of continued support of the quality we had during beta, but instead we have waited months for bug fixes which have never arrived. ST2 was essentially abandoned after it left beta, and now we find our money hasn't gone into supporting the product we paid for, it's gone into funding the next one.
As a developer I know this makes excellent business sense, but as a user it feels like I've been tricked. The changelist looks more like a point release, but one we have to pay another 50% for in the hope our bug reports will eventually be acknowledged. Given the past 6 months I have no confidence that'll happen.
Perhaps I'm being unfair - after all, I use ST2 all the time, and I've certainly got my money's worth out of it, even with the bugs - but something about this just doesn't feel right.
I paid for Sublime Text 2 with the expectation of continued support of the quality we had during beta, but instead we have waited months for bug fixes which have never arrived.
Rationally, as a software guy, this seems somehow unfair. After all, even as it was launched and without any further changes, ST2 is a good product at a low price.
But the reality is that I feel the same way as radiac. When I chose to spend real money on a text editor -- not exactly a field where the free competition is lacking -- I did so because I wanted to support and encourage a project that did seem to have a lot of nice little touches and did seem to keep coming out with them. The obvious and abrupt end of the stream of incremental updates the moment ST2 went final does irritate me.
Unfortunately, contrary to the post I just read about how stable ST2 is, I have seen irritating crashes that stopped me using it for some work, and I haven't seen a bug fix even for that, nor any other improvement since I sent the money. I probably won't pay for ST3 at this point, because at least now I've figured out what does crash ST2 and how to avoid it, and fairly or otherwise, the assumption in the back of my mind is going to be that ST3 might make a few minor improvements of the kind we used to get anyway, but if it has any sort of crash or data loss bugs they won't get fixed.
I felt this way about Ultra-Edit32 for a long time on Windows. I bought in college, and I believe it had a "... and future upgrades are automatically free" clause. It made me have a LOT of faith that this would be a useful and awesome product, and I was a happy user for many years. (In a sense, I bought it twice, as I asked my employer to buy it for me later.)
As a prospective user of Sublime Text (3, now), it's interesting to think about how I would feel had I bought ST2 a year ago, and now felt compelled to upgrade. The price is semi-negligible, in terms of how much one pays for a quality tool -- it's a fraction of the price of Komodo IDE or PyCharm, for example -- but the hassle is still annoying.
As Silhouette points out, it really makes one wonder about how long "support" (bugfixes, etc) will last for the current version. I think one of the more interesting questions to arise from this thread has been what the difference is (or should be?) between a point release (vN.5) and version N+1.
If you subscribe to versioning schemes like for instance semantic versioning [1], then the major version number must be incremented "if any backwards incompatible changes are introduced to the public API". In that sense, the change from Python 2 to 3 could warrant it.
I'd rather Jon ask for more money by ticking the version up and cranking out stuff than let the editor fester like TextMate 2.
That's what I view as honest, "I'm going to work on ST3 to convince you that its worth buying."
I haven't faced the same quality issues you speak of. TM2 has been rock solid for me. The only thing that never felt right was the theme (install Soda) and icon (Yuck, reminds me of Comic Sans)
I'm not saying that he should keep pumping out new features for ST2 - it's totally fair to draw a line under it on the day it leaves beta and say "no more features". My complaint is that he took ST2 out of beta while people were still complaining about bugs, and has subsequently only issued one bugfix release.
As both a user and a developer, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect paid software to get support and bugfixes for a while - at least until the next version leaves beta. "Pay an extra 50% and maybe I'll fix the bugs" doesn't seem fair.
Good point about expectations. I wonder if the problem really is that it was in beta for so long, instead of being released in a slightly more buggy state, and then having most of the bugs fixed in point releases after that.
I'm happy to pay Jon as long as he keeps cranking out fast, high-quality software. Think of it as a subscription where you still own the software if you want to get out of it.