Hacker News Reader

Comment by vishalmullur | Hacker News Reader

Maybe a year ago (or couple of months ago, I can’t recall) but I found out about Zed and since I was learning Rust, I wanted to contribute. But then I saw that they have a CLA. So while it won’t be easy to go closed source and not upset their users, it definitely is possible. Any contributions, no matter how important, are already covered by the CLA.

I did not contribute anymore after seeing the CLA

View on HN

Ah yeah, they have a CLA that forces you to give them a carte blanche copyright license to contributions and they also restrict dependencies to be ones with permissive licensing too.

Pretty obvious what's going on here. I hate seeing it happen, though.

FWIW, we plan to sell "enterprise" builds of Zed with SSO, centralized plugin repositories, business-hosted infra, etc. etc. The sorts of features developers don't care about but businesses do. To do that, we have to be able to re-license the codebase and apply these changes. We have a lot of other ideas for business sustainability but the core, offline code editing experience will always be freely available and open source though :)

Hey - I'm the founder of WorkOS. Happy to chat about the playbook we see with OSS projects spinning-off a commercial offering. It's pretty common and we work with a lot of these businesses, enabling them to continue investment in the ecosystem too. mg@workos.com

I don't really expect you to respond but if this is true why not use a CLA that guarantees the code stays open source? The FSFE FLA exists and is prominently used (though optional) by KDE.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com