I love this editor and it makes me sad to see how the project is stalled.

In 2002 the investors behind Blender launched the "Free Blender" campaign. They asked for 100,000 EUR as a one-time fee for open sourcing it. At the time the project was dying as a proprietary product. The investors got the money and today Blender is a healthy open source project.

I would love to see something similar with Sublime Text. The author seems uninterested in continuing with its development while many users want to see it moving forward. I believe it can raise much more money than Blender at the time.

A lot of ST users are former Textmate users, too. So we've certainly been through this rigamarole before.

Textmate 2 did exactly what Blender did. Went open source, has a healthy developer community, and has had steady updates for a couple of years. They still call it "Alpha" but it is very stable and I use it every day.