6 ms·

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 m

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).

keyle 2y ago
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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- TylerE 2y ago
  I’ll have to give it a look. I’m an increasingly disenchanted IntelliJ customer also.
  - gregoryl 2y ago
    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!)?
    - keyle 2y ago
      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.
- Barrin92 2y ago
  >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.
  - hu3 2y ago
    Wow it still doesn't support debugging it seems. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/5065 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.
  - TiredOfLife 2y ago
    Zed is closer to VS Code than an ide like intelliJ or text editor like Sublime
- monooso 2y ago
  > 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?
  - TiredOfLife 2y ago
    That's just the old copypasta: "If you don't pay for the product, you are the product"
blackoil 2y ago
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.
- pimeys 2y ago
  Yep. Maybe a good copilot written in Rust and tightly integrated into Zed. Offer a subscription model. I'd pay for that.
krelian 2y ago
This is answered in their FAQ: https://zed.dev/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.
- IshKebab 2y ago
  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.
  - jbrr 2y ago
    Really? I’ve had employers pay for my Jetbrains subscription.
    - ecmascript 2y ago
      But with Jetbrains products, you pay or the entire software, not just part of it .
      - herval 2y ago
        Community edition is free, and it’s a sizable chunk of the entire product
        ecmascript 2y ago
        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.
    - Philip-J-Fry 2y ago
      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.
pimeys 2y ago
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.
uludag 2y ago
> 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 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/main/LICENSE-GPL MS Visual Studio Code's license: https://code.visualstudio.com/license https://code.visualstudio.com/license I believe this alone shows much more good will towards developers and much less strings attached.
- z33k 2y ago
  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 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.
  - uludag 2y ago
    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.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

keyle 2y ago

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.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
TylerE 2y ago
I’ll have to give it a look. I’m an increasingly disenchanted IntelliJ customer also.
- gregoryl 2y ago
  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!)?
  - keyle 2y ago
    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.
Barrin92 2y ago
>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.
- hu3 2y ago
  Wow it still doesn't support debugging it seems. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/5065 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.
- TiredOfLife 2y ago
  Zed is closer to VS Code than an ide like intelliJ or text editor like Sublime
monooso 2y ago
> 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?
- TiredOfLife 2y ago
  That's just the old copypasta: "If you don't pay for the product, you are the product"

blackoil 2y ago

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.

pimeys 2y ago
Yep. Maybe a good copilot written in Rust and tightly integrated into Zed. Offer a subscription model. I'd pay for that.

krelian 2y ago

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

IshKebab 2y ago
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.
- jbrr 2y ago
  Really? I’ve had employers pay for my Jetbrains subscription.
  - ecmascript 2y ago
    But with Jetbrains products, you pay or the entire software, not just part of it .
    - herval 2y ago
      Community edition is free, and it’s a sizable chunk of the entire product
      - ecmascript 2y ago
        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.
  - Philip-J-Fry 2y ago
    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.

pimeys 2y ago

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.

uludag 2y ago

> 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 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/main/LICENSE-GPL MS Visual Studio Code's license: https://code.visualstudio.com/license https://code.visualstudio.com/license I believe this alone shows much more good will towards developers and much less strings attached.

z33k 2y ago
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 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.
- uludag 2y ago
  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.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]