J. Todd Slack emailed in and asked us to inform everyone that their donations towards the FreePepper project will be returned to all who contributed. The contributions from the community were a bit above $500 USD and that was obviously not enought as $11,000 were needed to open source Pepper. “I have come up with the funds privately to buy Pepper and I will be returning everyone’s donations in the next few days. I thank everyone who donated” Mr Slack said. Pepper will stay commercial and it will not be open sourced.
Pepper Donations to Return Back; Pepper to Stay Commercial
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Comunity gave money for the souce code of Blender but why to give money for an text editor ? We have tons of high quality editors and IDEs for programming (Xemacs, emacs, gvim, anjuta, kdevelop, etc).
This fact shows that use donations for open code as business strategy doesn’t work. If he wants donate you sourcecode for the comunity, ok.
Pepper will stay commercial and Mr Slack will not sell any license …
I think that linux world is very different from the shareware/proprietary Windows world …
>Pepper will stay commercial and Mr Slack will not sell any license …
Thank you for forseeing the future.
>I think that linux world is very different from the shareware/proprietary Windows world
The main market for Pepper is Mac and Windows anyway. So that won’t probably matter.
>Pepper will stay commercial and Mr Slack will not sell any license …
Why not?
Since people did not donate, I assume that you don’t need it open-sourced……
We will see what happens.
Well, pepper used its own properietory toolkit in linux. I don’t why anyone would want to use that under linux.
I use the gtk scite under kde and feel bad enough. At least gtk is functional and well-tested.
Oh well, hopefully qt scintilla will turn into a ktexteditor or whatever they need for a kde component.
>Well, pepper used its own properietory toolkit in linux. I don’t why anyone would want to use that under linux.
This is stupid. If there is one system that has a zillion toolkits, all in-your-face at each given desktop time you spend, that is Unix and especially Linux. I don’t see why one more would hurt.
As for Windows and Mac, while Pepper doesn’t use 100% their native toolkits, the app does look native to these OSes, and these platforms are actually the main market where Pepper did sell.
From reading the info about Pepper, it seems pretty cool – but, another text editor? kedit, gedit, nedit, vi, vim, emacs, xemacs, kdevelop, anjuta, eclipse, jed, pico, joe, and the list goes on and on.
Pepper is not an IDE (Anjuta, Kdevelop, Eclipse are). It is simply a GUI programmer’s editor (not a “text editor”). From all the ones you mentioned here, none is actually what Pepper really is (Vi, emacs etc are not exactly what new coders would want to use). KDE’s Kate would be a close comparison, but you didn’t mention that one.
I dont think that this was really a bad thing. It shows that the community wont just go and buy anything just to make it opensource. We actually did NEED a good 3D program, and Blender was known for its quality, so it was actually worth while for the community. Companies cant expect to just have their programs “freed” for the hell of it cause they arent making money with them.
I don’t think most people using Windows or MacOS give a damn about the million crappy editers on nix.
nedit,bedit,ledit,zedit,xedit,crapedit…., plus a zillion versions of emacs, vi & so on. When I used nedit,vi,emacs I hated them all.
On Windows Codewright sells very well and and it ain’t cheap, atleast $200. On Mac, BBEdit does very well even among non programmers. Pepper will do well if it stays in the $50-$100 range. Most power editers usually have some wierdness or weakness in some feature that leaves the door open for an alternate.
Very well said JJ. Pepper’s main market is Win and Mac, not Linux.
“Very well said JJ. Pepper’s main market is Win and Mac, not Linux.”
I would say at this point it is only Mac. I tried Pepper for Windows XP shortly before he discontinued it. The demo version was extremely crash prone and horribly unstable. It wasn’t even beta quality much less release quality. The Windows XP version is going to need a lot of work before it will be taken seriously.
Also, it needs a more functional demo. The version I had popped up nag screens sometimes every 30 seconds or so. I can’t do a reasonable evaluation of software when my work gets interupted every 30 seconds by a nag screen that won’t close for 5 seconds. Basically, I got so frustrated by the nag screens I removed the software about 2 minutes after installing it.
> The demo version was extremely crash prone and horribly unstable […] I removed the software about 2 minutes after installing it.
I was able to crash or lock Pepper on Windows too (I told Maarten about some problems), but not after using it for only 2 minutes.
“I was able to crash or lock Pepper on Windows too (I told Maarten about some problems), but not after using it for only 2 minutes.
”
Well, ok. Maybe it was closer to 20 minutes or so. :p But basically, the point is that the demo version was so obnoxious about nagging people to register that it was nearly impossible to evaluate the software. Ultimately, it was the obnoxious nagging that caused me to just delete the software.
To JJ :
200$ for an editor ? I guess the binary is delivered in pure platinium ;-)))
To Eugenia :
I don’t want to discuss about Mac’s market, but for Windows i agree with the lead post : “It will stay commercial and he will not sell nothing …”
What version of Pepper were you trying? If I recall there eas a problem with busy loops in earliy 4.0.x days. I use 4.0.6 every day with no problems.
If you try that one or can reproduce the problem, I would be happy to fix it, of course.
I am implementing testTrack Pro here in a few days then anyone can lodge feedbadk, bugs, enhancements, etc
Thanks,
-Jason
>I use 4.0.6 every day with no problems.
I get a lockup, pretty consistently. A race condition it seems to be. Maarten was not able to fix it, as it seems to happen on my SMP machine…
“What version of Pepper were you trying? If I recall there eas a problem with busy loops in earliy 4.0.x days. I use 4.0.6 every day with no problems.”
I don’t remember what version it was. If I had to guess, I would say I probably downloaded it about six months ago. I haven’t tried it since then.
I would be willing to try it again, but not if the registration scheme continues to be so obnoxious. Like I said, it was almost impossible to do an effective evaluation with the nag screens it had.
If priced right, Pepper could compete head to head with BBEdit for Macs. I’ll certainly buy it. It sounds like the Windows version needs work, but Jason said they have a little team already to go and start working on it.
I am a little confused about the whole process of starting Free Pepper and then stopping it, in less than 1 month. I sent you an email the first week, asking about the return of funds policy, and the licence you planned to use. You then added this info to the web site as I hoped, and your donations had grown slowly from $100 to $500. My company is interested in a good, open-source, cross-platform, lightweight, editor (We currently use Pe on BeOS, MPW on Mac, and KEdit on Linux), and had already expressed to Marteen our desire to buy copies of Pepper (which he refused to sell since he decided to close down 1 week after I first spoke with him).
I had just begun the process of petitioning my manager to donate the money we we’re going to give to Marteen for licenses, to the FreePepper organization for the source drive (somewhere between $200-$500 only, but still).
I don’t know how long Blender took to raise the money, but it was longer than a month. And with a little bit of net marketing (interviews with community websites and such) I am confident the money would have continued to come in at an increasing rate.
Besides using the program on other platforms, the very first plan my company had for the source code, was to port Pepper back to BeOS – so that all platforms could use the exact same editor – not possible with any other decent editor in existence. And this work would have been given back to the FreePepper site for the benifit of all.
Can you even imagine the amount of momentum a good GUI programmer’s editor could get from the open source community, once it is identified as being stable on all of their target platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, BeOS). And if you’ve ever used any other Linux editor, you realize how poor they really are right now – but a year from now they won’t be … so the only chance to get them behind you, instead of against you, is right now.
Sincerely
(Vi, emacs etc are not exactly what new coders would want to use).
objection! I don’t know whether being 30 and more of a linguist than a programmer i qualify, but i am definitely addicted to emacs!
fred
>I don’t know how long Blender took to raise the money, but it was longer than a month.
Blender had more than $30,000 the first month (it needed $100,000). Pepper had $500. It is obvious that this wouldn’t work and Pepper can’t wait forever. So Jason decided to take Pepper all in his shoulders. I think it makes sense business-wise.
When I had to start programming on a Win32 platform (because Windows just hates to interoperate and I needed to interface with a PDC and an Exchange server), I got EditPlus and never looked back. $200 for a 10 user license. It seemed like too easy of a choice.
What does this Pepper do that EditPlus cannot? I am not trying to start a holy war, I just want to know what people use to program on Win32 now that I am forced to. I mainly program in C with some C++ and some Perl if I have to munge text. I hate IDE’s because I think they are cumbersome and get in my way. Is Pepper the mainstay for Win32 programmers?
Jeremy
Believe it or not, some SW sells for values obviously far beyond the imagination of some of the readers here even for what seem to be trivial SW. If you are still in school/college, or even high school, any price might be too much. Once you get a salary, your employer probably won’t mind spending a few hundred for this & that, what ever makes you happy/productive. If you don’t like your tools & the boss won’t splurge a little, you are probably in the wrong job.
Some of the SW I use easily costs 6 figures, and thats just the annual license. It still comes on regular RCDs though. Quite alot of that expensive SW runs on Linux coz it’s so close to Sun/HP nix. Tis a shame that Linux can’t develop a healthy utility/office market to go along with it.
but then the developer of Pepper (who’s name I now don’t recall) decided that us puny little BeOS users are not worth the grace of This Magestic Editor, so he discontinued development and decided to concentrate on Mac, Windows and maybe Linux.
But being the cheapo bastard that I am, I knew I wouldn’t have cought up 30 (or was it 50?) buxors for a text editor anyway, so I couldn’t care less. And shortly after that gvim was ported to BeOS. Happy happy joy joy, as Stimpy says (Ren ‘n’ Stimpy).
I’m not saying Pepper wasn’t good, ‘coz I know it was. It had some great features compared to gvim. But gvim is free and it is 100% compatible with the standard vi edtor, which I have to use at work every day (and sometimes during the week-end, too), so I was really familiar with it.
I use nedit quite a lot on a day-to-day basis for writing C and C++ source, and I find it to be a very powerfull and full-featured editor.
I just downloaded the Linux demo of Pepper 4.0.6, and apart from the fact that it displays with completely messed up colours and almost unreadable menus, it looks like it has much the same feature-set as nedit.
What’s supposed to be so special about this editor??
nedit,bedit,ledit,zedit,xedit,crapedit…., plus a zillion versions of emacs, vi & so on. When I used nedit,vi,emacs I hated them all.
heh, the most powerful text editors known to man-kind.
even Microsoft software engineers use VIM:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/vimannounce/message/103
Well, nedit has the disadvantage of not existing on BeOS. And also, if you use Win32 as often as I do, you wil find Nedit close to unusable. You need to have cygwin AND xfree for win32, in order to run it. It’s slower than slow.
Nedit is good for Linux and UNIX, though.
Hey, there is one browser which I found simple and very elegant. Development has, unfortunately, stopped. It’s asedit. Ever heard of it? Well, neverming, believe me, it was a great editor for the masses.
I’m getting ready to go to bed, ‘xcuse me.
BTW, while we are on the subject of brows… oops, I mean, editors: emacs has the disadvantage of being simply enormeous, bloated beyond bloat, and therefore very memory hungry.
Nor Mr. Slack.
But I’d like to congratulate Slack on his very mature attitude. Giving money back is very responsible.
And, yes, nobody knows the future. When I started, there was an ordinary company which would produce crappy programs at a very fast pace. I used to be amazed at how poorly made their products were.
Well, to sum it up, they not only got rich but still managed to grasp 90% of the market — and are now considered “geniuses”.
A Brazilian politician, Ruy Barbosa, once made a harsh speech, criticizing our corruption, more or less alonmg these lines:
— “Seeing so much dishonesty, such corruption and so many nullities triumph, one almost comes to be ashamed of being honest…”
Another writer, Machado de Assis — equally famous, wrote jokingly:
— “Seeing so many nullities triumph, I decided to try it myself…”
So, keep trying! :^D
there is no reason why an editor cannot make good money seeing how dumb editors currently are. Do you really think your editor is using your computer to its full potential??
Lots o’ money can be made, I think, with an intelligent editor that seriously helps development. An editor should be like a very good assistant who is not intrusive but providing constant information, feedback, hints, tips, etc. Not being intrusive is key of course since we don’t want Mr. Paper Clip back!
Think about all the errors that the compiler/run time interpreter flags and then wonder how those could have been fixed during the editing process with a smart editor.
Give developers a time-saver and you will have a good money maker.
Think out of the box!
Speaking of yet-another-editor.. ;-). I’m working on a clone of DOS’s Edit.com for FreeBSD (and should compile on other unixes and unix-alikes). I’m starting from an apparently abandoned GPL project, Fred.. Does anyone know if I would be duplicating any other projects work? And by clone, I am indeed trying to make it as close as possible, alt shortcuts, graphics and all.
So now that the free pepper is closed, will J. Todd Slack work on a port back to BeOS? I know that if Pepper was open sourced that there are many different developers which would have been happy to do such work, but now we are unsure if this will ever be completed.
>> So now that the free pepper is closed, will J. Todd Slack work on a port back to BeOS?
There WILL be a BeOS port. I still have a BeBox that I like to use.
-Jason
Can I ask why have you chosen to clone old DOS-EDIT?
I am also developing my own editor http://metaeditor.sf.net/ and my visions is far from DOS-EDIT. I have great plans!!
The comercial way of development is using Paretos principle, which say that 80% of benefit comes from the first 20% of effort. All comercial projects has a tendency to skip the last 20% of benefits. The same with Pepper!
Im aiming for those last 20% benefits that other projects skips and which I want.
I’m an UltraEdit user at heart, but the Pepper demo was quite a nice experience. Don’t like its implementation of multi file view, though.
Screw them both, I don’t need either. Gaming box and laptop is Windows, Servers are FreeBSD and *nix workstations are FreeBSD, Solaris and NetBSD, I feel no need for Linux or that editor, vi is good enough.
It’s nice to be able to use the same application on a variety of platforms, but there are seperate editors similar enough to be easily used from platform to platform.
You’ve got Bluefish ( http://bluefish.openofficle.nl )on all sorts of Unix boxes, for example, and the closed source, but freeware (“careware”) Arachnophilia ( http://www.arachnoid.com/arachnophilia/ ) on Windows (and now, with the Java-based version, on a whole load of platforms). I have yet to see better editors.
For EDIT.COM cloners: MP isn’t quite a clone of MS-DOS edit, but it has an interface remniscent of edit.com and is fairly full-featured — it may be a better starting poing than Fred.
CrimsonEditor (http://www.crimsoneditor.com/) is a nice little freeware editor, I think. You can’t compare its feature set to UltraEdit and the like, of course.
(Sorry for the double post, but in case anyone wonders: UltraEdit can be found here: http://www.ultraedit.com/ – never used a better editor.)
I’ll do something about the nagging so that you can evaluate it fully.
Are you interested in doing so if I do this?
-Jason
>>I use 4.0.6 every day with no problems.
>I get a lockup, pretty consistently. A race condition it >seems to be. Maarten was not able to fix it, as it seems >to happen on my SMP machine…
SMP?
If you can provide me more information, I can look into it.
While I might just be an oddball, I really enjoy jEdit, and it runs on most any platform. I currently use it on Linux, Solaris, Windows 2K/XP, and Macos X. It works well, is speedy enough for a text editor (blazing fast text editors don’t make you type faster), and looks the same on all my platforms.
Just my 1/50th of a buck.
SMF
Keith,
There is a BeOS port of Pepper. I don’t know the whle status of this port, but I will find out what shape it is in.
If your company still wants copies of Pepper, It is for sale!. If you tell me how many copies your company planned to purchase, originally, I will work with you to make the price fair.
I am considering a “pay one price”, “get all platoforms” type of thing, but it is a bit early, so I welcome feedback.
Please e-mail me privately to discuss.
-Jason
“I’ll do something about the nagging so that you can evaluate it fully.
Are you interested in doing so if I do this?
-Jason”
Yes. I would evaluate it fully if you did this. Don’t go to a great deal of trouble though. I don’t head a department or anything. So if I did evaluate it and find it suitable, it would only result in one purchase for you. (I’d write you a good review though.)
>>>I use 4.0.6 every day with no problems.
>>I get a lockup, pretty consistently. A race condition it >>seems to be. Maarten was not able to fix it, as it seems
>>to happen on my SMP machine…
>SMP?
>If you can provide me more information, I can look into it.
Ouch, pretty straightforward computer terminology…
SMP = Symmetric Multi Proccessing
At the worst, a quick Google search should have gotten the un-initiated a clue ;-)…
Ouch, pretty straightforward computer terminology…
SMP = Symmetric Multi Proccessing
I’m pretty sure he wanted more information on how to reproduce the bug, not what SMP meant.
Neoneye: I know this is sacred territory for some unix users, but I’m not too fond of emacs or vi, and I’m also a beginner programmer, so I didn’t want to set my goals too high.
I have to agree with SMF, jEdit is the best editor I have used. It has some really nice features, and lots of great plugins. I also like emacs, but just getting it all configured so that it works the way you want it to is a task in itself, which is fine if you have the time, but I find it a real chore. jEdit can be found at http://www.jedit.org
Are you saying that that software, which costs obviously more than we can imagine, is more valuable than Linux? I’m curious because I don’t think software inherently has value, other than what it actually computes. Value is often placed on the packaging, proprietary secrets, intellectual property, and licensing, but not on the actual software itself. How valuable is Linux or gedit compared with Pepper or that software you mentioned? If you can answer that then try this one… How valuable is it to know that Linux, including gedit, and all its future updates, releases, security patches, and bug fixes, will always be free?
I wish I had more interest in coding C.
I liked Pepper–I’m a registered owner. As I’ve written before, I was never particularly comfortable with Maarten’s attitude toward sales, starting with cavalier comments he made about BeOS Intel users back in the R3 days. It’s obvious he failed to understand that building a better mousetrap wasn’t enough when, particularly on the Mac platform, you were competing against another programming editor with a market share comparable to Microsoft Word’s in the word processing market.
And frankly, after I threw in the towel and bought BBEdit, I’m not sure that he did build a better mousetrap–just a different one. The “accelerator” looks cool, but it isn’t more efficient than palettes, and BBEdit 7 just does more than Pepper does. I hope you make your money back but you’re going to have to put some really serious effort into marketing.
It seems to be fashionable here to bash Unix editors, too, but the list of features GVIM has that Pepper doesn’t are noticable (folding, scriptability, batch processing, vertically split windows, for starters). And some features people assume GVIM doesn’t (editing files remotely, visual diffs, printing–and for that matter, tear-off menus and user-definable toolbar buttons), it actually does.
BBEdit and Pepper win over GVIM for web editing (and again, BBEdit wins over Pepper), but for code editing that’s not at all a clear choice–and yes, I’ve done both professionally, and tried both Pepper and GVIM in a variety of situations. It’s ludicrous–and honestly a little offensive–for people to keep implying that someone would have to be an idiot to spend time learning a free but powerful editor with a steep learning curve rather than spending $40, $80 or more on something “easier” that may not, for their purposes, actually be any better.
Pepper was never available for BeOS. Pe was. And Pe has nothing to do with Pepper.
I for one am a sworn (and registered
) user of Pepper, even though I tried BBEdit before and continue to get into it from time to time. There are mainly two reasons for this:
1. I can use 8-bit character Windows development on mac (BBEdit does not support Windows ANSI encoding)
2. The multi-file view of Pepper makes me able to have open the 20-30 files at once that I want to have open, without cluttering my desktop so much that the other developing tools I use are hard to find or use
So my hat off to you, Jason, for taking the stick up – best of luck and DO give us a sign whenever you have gotten Pepper together and a new version is in the coming…
Good luck with your project, I wish you the best.
>So my hat off to you, Jason, for taking the stick up – >best of luck and DO give us a sign whenever you have >gotten Pepper together and a new version is in the
>coming…
Thank you and I will certainly post an article with the new website address, etc
-Jason
>Pepper was never available for BeOS. Pe was. And Pe has >nothing to do with Pepper.
Eugneia is correct.
There is a port of Pepper for BeOS, but it is not finished.
-Jason
I did make a mistake, of course, what I meant is “Pe used to be big on BeOS” but at that time Pepper was widely regarded as the successor of Pe, and we were receiving signals that Pepper would appear on BeOS. So I think it’s a bit unfair to say that “Pe has nothing to do with Pepper”. It has something to do..
And Pe has nothing to do with Pepper.
Kind of like saying Windows 2k has nothing to do with Windows NT 4
Pepper IS Pe in the sense that the libraries that we’re used to build Pe, we’re improved and changed, and then used to build Pepper. Basically Pepper is Pe refactored to be cross-platform, and to not support multi-thread (this was not the intention, but it is the reason it didn’t backport to BeOS easily). Pepper has as much code in common with Pe, as Apache 2 has with Apache 1.
Todd – how are you backporting to BeOS, by making Pepper support multithreading, or by making BeOS appear single threaded? The solution we we’re going to implement first was to use a simple global semaphore to make BeOS’s multithreading appear transparent to the library … but without more experience in the code, I can’t know where it would and wouldn’t work.
Also, for everyone interested, Pe is still maintained at beunited.org, and is currently getting some minor bug fixes, and small features added. The current goal for Pe is to make it completely stable, including fixing the settings modification system.
The next goal for Pe is to make it easier for people to add completely different parsers (for languages with different rules than the html and c families) and toolbars on a per language basis. The one gapping hole in Maarten’s documentation was the parser interface.
Hi,
I’m looking for pepper binaries for irix, freebsd, win2k … and if it runs win jaguar macos x (but AFAIK there is no Pepper/Jaguar).
And if anyone will sell a multiplattform key, please let me know and send me an email [ beos(at)gmx.ch ]
Big thx in advance,
LoCal
>I’m looking for pepper binaries for irix, freebsd, >win2k … and if it runs win jaguar macos x (but AFAIK
>there is no Pepper/Jaguar).
Pepper can run on Jaguar.
Pepper is also still for sale, if yu are interested, please let me know.
I know own Pepper and it will stay commercial.
-Jason