I know sublime text is not open source and its not free either. But most people still use the unpaid version, so how does sublime text support itself ?
Who said most people still use the unpaid version?
Tons of people (from forums etc) use v3, which means they paid for v2 (or pirated it). I have paid for v2 and use v3 myself.
He also hired an extra guy during v2 development, which means he made enough money to have that. And in general, it's a hugely succesful project with Windows and OS X users.
If John saw that the unpaid version was an issue, he'd just cancel it.
I never downloaded or paid anything for v2, but I did download v3 (the official build, from the official site) to give it a try. I didn't end up sticking to it, but I was definitely able to run it without buying a license, albeit with occasional popups.
I have never paid for it, so I assumed most people like around 80% would be using it free. What would be your estimate of people actually paying for the product.
I don't have any meaningful data to estimate. Sublimetext is used in countless videos/webcasts, some of them by Google or Microsoft.
A quick google search brings the post [http://blog.leanpub.com/2014/01/leanpub-ebook-sales-guest-po...] with sales numbers of a book about Sublime text I never even heard of. 1000 sales of a book about a text editor! My best guess would be that the text editor itself sold about a couple orders of magnitude more copies.
Tons of people (from forums etc) use v3, which means they paid for v2 (or pirated it). I have paid for v2 and use v3 myself.
He also hired an extra guy during v2 development, which means he made enough money to have that. And in general, it's a hugely succesful project with Windows and OS X users.
If John saw that the unpaid version was an issue, he'd just cancel it.