[JetSetWilly]

I don't see how it is a crowded market. Apparently Sublime Text is good enough to make a living as a paid-for, closed source piece of software, in spite of the existence of tons of high quality open source editors like emacs and vim. That alone suggests that commoditising it as an open source product would indeed add value.

And if the sublime text author had followed your argument, Sublime Text would not have existed. "Textmate already exists, and so do excellent open source editors. Why bother cloning textmate on windows?"

I for one would be very interested in an open source Sublime Text clone.