Actually the source is available and quite a few people have made it run on Linux. From what I hear it is still pretty unstable on Linux, but if a few gurus grabbed hold of it, it would probably quickly get up to speed.
I think it probably could have been working on linux with outside contributors if the license[1] did not contain strict requirements such as maintaining licensing.
So the source is indeed available but it isn't really open so it hurts in outside contributions.
I wouldn't call it opensource. Only the GUI is opensource. The core functionality is binary. You could not port it to OSX or BSD (unless the BSD in question can load linux .so)
What problem do you have with the license? It doesn't require any release of source and it doesn't prevent sale of the software. It looks a lot like a BSD license.
* Any redistribution, in whole or in part, must retain full licensing functionality, without any attempt to change, obscure or in other ways circumvent its intent.
That would imply that you have to keep the binary blobs, and that you wouldn't be allowed to reverse engineer them (say, if the E-text editor guy goes out of business).
It sounds to me like reverse engineering would be fine. All it says is that redistribution must retain the license as-is with no attempt to change or obscure the license.
That's "licensing functionality", which is not necessarily just the license itself. Given that the original program is licensed ($49 or something), that seems pretty clear to me - particularly given that otherwise it's a BSD licence, so clauses 1-2 cover the case that you mention.
Obviously the only real test of the wording is in court, but it'd be enough to make some people steer clear of it.
I don't really have a problem but the licensing is a problem for other people, not to mention that it contains binary blobs (I don't know if it is windows only) for it to work which greatly reduces how much a person can see how the program works in order for them to fix it.
Oh sweet, I hadn't noticed the new feature and I've been looking at a bridge from my current text editors (e and BBEdit) to vim. Thanks for linking to this.
I was paying attention up to the part where you make it start in insert mode for use with the mouse, menus etc. I like working in the terminal, with as little mouse action as humanly possible, and (for crying out loud) in normal mode. Normal mode is where the action happens, and I'm fairly sure I'm not the only vim user who feels that way.
