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Comment by submeta | Hacker News Reader

When I heared that Zed is VC backed, it was a signal to move away from it. Emacs, NeoVim will be here in fifty years from now. VC backed companies don’t have a guarantee. VCs except too much, and pressure founders to pivot if they don’t seem to fulfill the promise for 20x return. See what happened to Evernote. Or SoundCloud.

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Zed is open-source under GPLv3 - https://github.com/zed-industries/zed

That doesn't guarantee it will have paid contributors indefinitely, but the same is true of the other editors you listed. It does, however, guarantee that if Zed (the company) were to disappear, community members would be free to continue using the Zed editor (and developing it) in perpetuity!

The problem is the concern of future development. Zed the company controls what gets merged. If it is profitable to leave some features out, will they leave them even if there is PR? Or something else. Compare it to the problems of Chromium.

Jacob Kaplan-Moss influenced my own thinking around this: https://social.jacobian.org/@jacob/111914179201102152

“We believe that open source should be sustainable and open source maintainers should get paid!”

Maintainer: introduces commercial features

“Not like that”

Maintainer: works for a large tech co

“Not like that”

Maintainer: takes investment

“Not like that”

The company is VC backed. Why would the software disappear though? It’s open source, so it can survive even if the company doesn’t

I was extremely skeptical about Zed being a VC-backed company. A couple of days ago, I did some research, saw that the project is really being developed in the open, it's fully open source, and they are constantly adding ways to use the AI features without paying them money. So I decided to try it, and as a long-time vim user, I was sold. It's what neovim should have been once they forked. You could get these modern features in neovim with plugins, but the plugins constantly keep breaking. I'm really happy that I decided to give it a chance, and I don't see the project dying after the VC money is gone.

My guess is that there aren't that many folks using zed over neovim/emacs. It seems like a more suitable alternative to vscode or jetbrains IDEs which imo have at least the same level of financial risks involved. At the end of the day it is just an editor and moving to something is pretty minimal effort if things do go in a direction you don't agree with.

I get enshitification in general, but your take is absurd. zed is merely a text editor, a tool operate on your local files with no special format, no lock in. It may charge you $1m a year , or show you one ad every 5 sec, then you don't have to use it...

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