Here’s some good news for developers of all platforms: the popular Mac text editor ‘Text Mate‘ is going open-source

TextMate is one of the most popular text editors available on OS X.

Announcing the open-sourcing on the TextMate blog, developer Allan Odgaard writes:

I’ve always wanted to allow end-users to tinker with their environment, my ability to do this is what got me excited about programming in the first place… …with the still growing user base, I think the best move forward is to open source the program.

Dig at Apple

Odgaard has chosen to distribute the code under the GPL 3 license but is open to using a ‘less restrictive license’ in the future.

“The hacker in me wants all software to be free (as in speech),” he says of this choice, “so in a time where our platform vendor [Apple] is taking steps to limit our freedom, this is my small attempt of countering such trend.”

Although the open-sourcing of TextMate2 doesn’t mean that the app will be poppong on Linux anytume soon, it does mean that the possibility is now there.

The code for TextMate 2 can be found on GitHub.