I can't speak for Marco, but I suspect he feels a bit like I do.
I used TextMate for a long time. I switched to TextMate 2 as soon as the beta hit. Over the last year, more and more of my peers have switched from TM/TM2 to Sublime Text in large part because it's better maintained than TextMate.
When Allan announced he was open sourcing TM2 I thought the writing was on the wall: TM2 was all-but-dead. I even shelled out for Sublime Text, resigned to learning a new text editor.
Every so often I'd open TM2, though, and each time there were a handful of updates. There were at least 3-4 updates per week!
My expectations were totally dashed. Rather than spelling the end of TM2, open sourcing it resulted in a new-found momentum for the project. I've since switched back from Sublime Text to TM2, just to see how it'll shake out.
The screenshot isn't exactly readable, but it appears that TexMate2's source code was put on Github on August 10th. Since then, there have been substantial changes as evidenced by release notes for changes being made several times a week since the release of the source code. Most notable I think are the August 26th release notes for changes since the previous notes on the 22nd and the August 19th release notes for changes since the previous notes on the 15th. If this kind of activity continues, it will prove false his prediction when it was open sourced that it would be abandoned.
In total hindsight, it seems like this should have been expected.
For open source projects to succeed, it needs a strong, clear voice and leader and a large community of users (which results in a large enough group of developers willing to contribute).
TM2 has the bonus in that there's an extremely significant overlap between the user base and those who can and want to contribute to development.
The only question was whether there would be someone taking charge and pushing development forward, accepting patches etc...
I didn't read whatever he's referring to either. It looks like Textmate is receiving regular (almost daily) updates so I assume his initial opinion of Textmate 2 was not very good.
