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Can someone explain. What is the catch ? Zed is worked on by paid employees. So who is the product, how is the money made and is it open source and if so, how much ? (Vscode has strings attached too)

Just interested since building my workflows around a company's products usually ends in tears (figuratively).

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This is answered in their FAQ: https://zed.dev/faq :

We envision Zed as a free-to-use editor, supplemented by subscription-based, optional network features, such as:

       Channels and calls
       Chat
       Channel notes

We plan to offer our collaboration features to open source teams, free of charge.

This seems pretty optimistic to me. I can't imagine any company I've worked for paying for those things. Especially because they're only going to be useful if everyone uses Zed which is unlikely.

Really? I’ve had employers pay for my Jetbrains subscription.

But with Jetbrains products, you pay or the entire software, not just part of it .

Community edition is free, and it’s a sizable chunk of the entire product

The difference is, all the important features are behind a paywall. This will not be the case for Zed it seems.

I have never worked at a place that uses Jetbrains products which does not pay for their premium offering.

With Jetbrains you're paying for the IDE.

Zed's vision is that the editor is free and you're paying basically for Teams-lite.

If you're a big company, you're already using a service like Teams, Slack, Zoom, etc.

If you're a small company, then there's free alternatives like Discord.

And say you want to talk to someone other than a programmer, then you'd need something else anyway. Because a project manager wouldn't need an IDE installed.

Indeed seems very uncommon where I am, even the IntelliJ’s are more often pirated than paid for.

From my perspective it is very weird to expect to beat MS (who produces two great IDE’s, not one) on their own game with this approach to dev.

I’m not saying it’s impossible to have the most important features replicated, but, c’mon, this is software, it breaks as it builds and some things are not possible Overnight even if you have the worlds top top top talent around.

You don't need to beat microsoft in order to have a viable business. You just need to get enough market share.

But, you also have to be better than what’s freely available by enough to get someone to pay for it. Having a good product isn’t good enough, you have to be significantly better.

Dev tooling is a notoriously difficult space to make money. Free tools tend to win because if a tool costs money, a developer is just as likely to write their own version. (For better or worse)

> Free tools tend to win because if a tool costs money, a developer is just as likely to write their own version.

No, free tools win because a proprietary license is a rent-seeking ball and chain on your means of production.

Btw Jetbrains made Webstorm (web editor) and Rider (.NET C#/F#) editor free now for non commercial use.

This might hurt Zed.

https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2024/10/24/webstorm-and-ride...

That’s the thing. Whatever editor I finally migrate from neovim to I’ll likely donate to.

I get so much insane value from open source and companies building for the platforms that I use that I’m happy to pay for them especially for small shops of really passionate hackers like the folks behind Zed.

You can donate to neovim too ;)

I don't have much hope in anything replacing it for me. Zed does a lot right but feels very very far away and with a weird focus (from my perspective).

Haha I already do!

For a VC-backed company, this will never ever generate enough revenue growth. So, the real answer is: "If all goes well, we will keep raising VC money and get acquired and shutdown / butchered in 5-10 years".

Like Bluesky, this monetization plan they present is just something to calm down the haters and sceptics. But if you think for two seconds, it does not make sense.

It might happen the way you describe, or, if they get more popular, then may try to think harder and offer more paid options. Now they're in a growth stage - they need to convince the largest possible number of developers they should switch from VS Code, and that is already a difficult task.

I know, this is the standard VC playbook: First growth at all costs to get everyone into the ecosystem, then pull up the net and monetize. The latter phase is usually when all the subscriptions, value-add nag screens, data sharing agreements and other enshittification goodies pop up.

And how would it work otherwise? You can't perpetually offer a product for free (in all senses of the word) AND satisfy exponential ROI expectations at the same time.

If this is what's going on here, I'm worried what the "monetization" phase will entail.

The other option I see is being owned by a behemoth like Microsoft, in VSCode case, who can pay millions per month in engineering salaries and PaaS, while keeping it free.

They are so big they can monetize it using Copilot or not even monetize it properly, just to get good faith from Developers, Developers, Developers.

I like it.

No, the other option is something like Sublime Text that has a small team working on it and is paid for by a very fair one-off payment by the customer.

Sounds like a third option. I have a Sublime license and I like it.

But no need to discard VSCode.

They are different tools anyway.

And while doing this, they fuck the whole market.

Well as an end user this is pretty much OK right, so long as you are aware of the deal? VC funded companies have subsidized and then abandoned a lot of useful OSS code over the years.

Whenever you encounter a VC backed open source project you know the rug pull will come eventually. It doesn't make the code they have written any less useful. If the tool is good enough then it will be forked and live on.

No, it's not ok. It fucks the whole market by subsidizing the growth with VC money. Either a big company will buy them, consolidating their power, or they will IPO and the VCs will cash out and let the public bear the cost. It fucks the customers who are not as well-informed about this as you are. In summary, it fucking sucks.

They're already laying the groundwork for a rug pull.

The fact that the developers will happy let you hide any button in the UI except the sign in button is a giant red flag.

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/11802

> Vscode has strings attached too

If software being FLOSS is in any way an important value of yours, the difference between Zed and Visual Studio Code is night and day:

Zed's GPL: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/main/LICENSE-GPL MS Visual Studio Code's license: https://code.visualstudio.com/license

I believe this alone shows much more good will towards developers and much less strings attached.

For what it's worth; Visual Studio Code and VSCode are not the same. VSCode is MIT licensed: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/main/LICENSE.txt

From vscodium.com:

Microsoft’s vscode source code is open source (MIT-licensed), but the product available for download (Visual Studio Code) is licensed under this not-FLOSS license and contains telemetry/tracking. According to this comment from a Visual Studio Code maintainer:

When we [Microsoft] build Visual Studio Code, we do exactly this. We clone the vscode repository, we lay down a customized product.json that has Microsoft specific functionality (telemetry, gallery, logo, etc.), and then produce a build that we release under our license.

When you clone and build from the vscode repo, none of these endpoints are configured in the default product.json. Therefore, you generate a “clean” build, without the Microsoft customizations, which is by default licensed under the MIT license

The VSCodium project exists so that you don’t have to download+build from source. [VSCodium] includes special build scripts that clone Microsoft’s vscode repo, run the build commands, and upload the resulting binaries for you to GitHub releases. These binaries are licensed under the MIT license. Telemetry is disabled.

What I find unfortunate is that VSCode and Visual Studio Code are so conflated. It's Visual Studio Code in the context of features, it's vscode in the context of license and community.

In this sense Zed is much cleaner as to what's up for for monetization. You look at the project and you know which parts will be candidates for business growth and which parts will stay in the community. With Visual Studio Code, the entire editor is game for monetization and utilization for Microsofts business goals, yet has the appearance of open source and community owned.

Microsoft are expert at hiding the strings. I prefer obvious strings if there have to be strings attached.

a very important difference is that MS doesn't let you use some of their quite nice language servers unless you're using VS Code, e.g. Pylance: https://github.com/microsoft/pylance-release/issues/483

for this reason, the non-MS-built VS Code isn't equivalent to theirs, regardless of the license of the editor itself.

https://zed.dev/terms has the Zed Editor use license. That’s different from the Zed source code license.

End you’re not allowed to reverse engineer the editor even though it builds from open source. I wonder how much legal reasoning went into that decision. It might be boilerplate, or it might be necessary for some other part of the contract.

I don’t know. Technically, you can clean-room reverse engineer a GPL binary and your resulting code doesn’t have to be GPL. But you could also just build the open source repo and do that. So I don’t know

I would be ready to pay money for Zed, but I'm happy it's all GPL including the dev server (AGPL). Even if this business does not work, we have the code and the community and all parts of the editor available. Thank you for the team for this.

Happy path is Open-Core where all enterprisesque features and plugins are part of a commercial pro model. Unhappy path involves switching licenses sometime later or project simply dying because of ROI.

Yep. Maybe a good copilot written in Rust and tightly integrated into Zed. Offer a subscription model. I'd pay for that.

You are the product. The editor is free afaik, and is very good. It has a plugin system and many languages have been added. It's really, really close to be my replacement to intelliJ. Sadly many bugs are stopping that for now.

They'll charge for integrations later, collaboration etc. I'm not sure exactly where the money is going to come from but I value a quality native IDE.

I hope they don't stuff crap down our mouth in the future and simply charge a one time fee per version. But that of course is unlikely to happen.

Every new version of IntelliJ I gasp that they F'd with something, and usually I'm right.

I’ll have to give it a look. I’m an increasingly disenchanted IntelliJ customer also.

I assume they did the same as with Rider, and made the UI objectively worse, rather than solve a million other things that actually need improvement (performance!)?

10 years ago, Intellij, 1 IDE to rule them all they said. There are 14-15 at my last count. Complete cash job.

Bugs I reported went unanswered for 3 years and then swept under the carpet, still not fixed. Obvious stuff too. Breaking and annoying stuff.

The best part was when they came out and claimed they had the best latency to screen rendering, long article explaining the technology etc. behind it. Mac just came out with retina screen, and their stuff is written in Java, did not handle any kind of graphics acceleration. It was a complete joke, just pressing 'aaaaaaaaaaa' on the keyboard would start lagging after 10 characters to seconds long to render. Insanely funny stuff. If you shrank the IDE to 1/4 of the screen it was much faster! yay.

I stopped paying a little while back and jumped on the community edition for debugging and other IDEs to write the code. I'm sick of their antics.

>It's really, really close to be my replacement to intelliJ

Isn't Zed just a text editor? The last time I checked it out it didn't have any debugging features which doesn't really make it a replacement for an IntelliJ IDE.

Wow it still doesn't support debugging it seems.

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/5065

People who use Zed now at work, sorry but you still print variables to debug issues? In 2024?

Zed is investing in features to satisfy shareholders like AI and team collab but ignoring a basic functionality like interactive debugging is mind blowing.

Zed is closer to VS Code than an ide like intelliJ or text editor like Sublime

> You are the product.

As far as I can tell from the Zed FAQs and license, this is false.

Can you provide information to support this assertion?

That's just the old copypasta:

"If you don't pay for the product, you are the product"

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