While I enjoy using open source software on principle, in practice I care way more about usability and feature set. I understand that some people make a conscious choice to only use free and/or opensource software, but it's flawed to claim closed-source software is somehow unfit to operate, especially based on the "fundamental"ness of the desired action.

I agree.

As far as a business case goes, there's no real "vendor lock in" with a plaintext editor like this. You can always switch to something else and your files will be fine/the same. You're investing (potentially non trivial) time to learn using it, but it didn't take me long to learn ST2 to a depth that made it really handy.

I will say I'd buy a lot more into that argument for people who develop plugins.

That said I can respect the "open source" only mindset. I'm just not sure I'm that concerned about it in this particular case.

I don't know whats the lifetime of these "trendy" closed-source tools since I was never a fan of them, I'd be worried that you loose more time by having to switch to a new tool each month. Exploring alternatives is nice, but you can't be doing that all the time.

For example there was a time when I switched a Linux distribution each month, then at some point I realized that it is getting me nowhere: I didn't know either of them in-depth or how to deal with their specific problems. So then I made a choice: I'll use only Debian, and actually learn about how to deal with problems when I encounter them, instead of jumping ship to another distro.

Its the same with text editors, I eventually settled on Vim (for a long time without any plugins), then started using plugins as well.

Sure every now and then I check what new alternatives are out there (for example there are some interesting ideas in http://leoeditor.com/ but not really comparable to Vim), but closed-source tools are never on my list. I only ever heard about Sublime Text here on HN, and even then for a long time I thought its a Mac only tool.

But with closed-source tools I just wouldn't have been motivated to stick with any of them: if there were problems with it then I wouldn't know how to work them around, or implement missing functionality, not to mention I wouldn't trust them to begin with etc.

ST has been out for six years. That's not going to be comparable to emacs (mid 1970's - now) or vi/vim (1976/1991 respectively). I haven't jumped on Atom, or any of the other brand new editors because I want to know they'll have some staying power, but I don't think 5+ years is short enough for me to be concerned. I'm certainly not changing editors every month. I also do most of my editor exploration in my free time, and it's fun for me, so it's not really a waste of time (again, for me, in that context).

I should say that I can't really settle on VIM right now because I'm doing full time .net work at this point. I still use it reasonably often when I'm mucking about in C at home, and I used it as my primary editor for at least five years prior to that, but my use-case was me trying to get a decent haskell environment up and running on a fresh linux VM as quickly as I could. ST2 worked really well for that.

I also care about being able to use the tool several years from now or on different distributions/OSes, etc. With closed source you are locked to whatever the vendor provides, you can't just recompile it if it doesn't work on your OS anymore. Also I don't have the time to reverse engineer and check the software for backdoors (not that I do that with the open-source one either, but at least its more obvious if something goes wrong there).

If you work on closed-source software then you probably don't care about this / doesn't matter there, but as someone who spends most of his time working on open-source software I definitely want my editor to be open-source.

If the vim developers announced next week they'd only support Linux, I'd keep using the Mac version until it becomes worse than a newer tool and then switch to that. The same is true of Sublime or any other text editor.

I'm not going to be forking an open source text editor if development stagnates.

Except that with an open-source tool you have the choice of using it as long as you want. Once it is part of a distribution like Debian or Fedora it is unlikely that it gets removed just because upstream stagnates, and it'll keep running. If there are enough users the distros might even maintain patches of their own, or fork it themselves. See for eg. tinydns, where the original is so old it doesn't even compile, yet there is a working version in Debian.

With closed source you don't have much choice except running an outdated chroot with an old distribution, or stop using it.

That's the same logic that got us OS X Mac using developers for Linux :(

Because it doesn't matter. The closed source tool isn't going to hide stuff in your text file. And should they change completely in a way you don't like or stop updating you switch tools you aren't locked in since its a text editor.

And honestly even with open source if the main devs stop updating or doing something you don't like you're time is almost certainly better spent doing what you're doing on a different editor or the old version then taking over development on yet another text editor.

I think you could also ask the question in a different way. What is the market for closed-source text editors? We have open-source text editors, and freeware(?) closed-source ones. So who would buy a closed-source text editor? (Talking about a text editor here, not an IDE)

So then why not just open-source it? Seems to me there are only drawbacks in keeping it closed.

I've paid for textmate and sublime text because they were better than their immediate competition for what I use them for. I know lots of other people who have paid for one or the other. I have a really nice tmux + vim workspace I use a lot but for unfamiliar codebases I find exploring a lot nicer in sublime.