The new Rust-based code editor delivers on its promise.
Zed is a relatively new code editor on the block. It’s a lightweight editor similar to Neovim and VSCode, and being non electron-based it aims to be performant.
It was received fairly well on release, but a lot of users on Reddit and other platforms raised concerns. Zed has telemetry, “online” code sharing, and is VC-backed, so some of the more die-hard FOSS enthusiasts have been less than pleased with this.
But as of this month, Zed has gone completely open source — and even better, they’ve released both parts of the editor under copyleft licenses. This means if anyone modifies Zed, any changes made must also be open sourced under the GPL. No feature locking and no walled gardens. Everyone gets the cool stuff!
Let’s take a little look at the licensing itself, and then explore how Zed is going to shape up in the future now that it’s open source.
The Licenses (GPL, AGPL)
Zed has been open-sourced with two licenses, for two different parts:
- The editor itself (GPL 3.0 License)
- Server-side code (AGPL License)
The editor itself is pretty self-explanatory. The server-side code refers to the networking elements, such as live collaboration and “online” components which some users are interested in.
If you want to have a look for yourself, head to the Zed repo, and inside of the “crates” directory each crate is linked to its respective license.
As mentioned a couple paragraphs ago, these are copyleft licenses so anyone who wants to fork Zed and add new features has to open source their code so everyone can benefit from their changes.
It’s also worth noting that the actual UI of the editor is built with their own in-house UI framework (GPUI) which they have also released under the Apache 2.0 license. It’s still being worked on and is currently only available for MacOS.
No matter what you think of Zed as an editor or the company, it’s always nice to see people just give things away for others to use for free. That’s super awesome.
Having open sourced their entire codebase though, what’s next for Zed? How will they monetize it? In their announcement they mentioned a couple of paths forward, but how exactly this will work with the open source model is not entirely clear.
What To Expect From Zed Going Forward
There are still some concerns on where Zed is going to be taken in the future. Zed Industries has raised $10M in VC capital, which means investors need to eventually be paid back. In my opinion though I don’t think this is a massive deal. Zed hits a lot of different markets, and for different individuals.
For the solo developers and indie hackers like myself, Zed fits a nice niche between VSCode and (Neo)Vim. You get a fairly minimal UI and fast editing experience, but without needing to do a bunch of custom setup. You also get Vim keybindings for free.
You get a lot of features that come out of the box in VSCode such as auto-complete/tab-completion features, different themes, an integrated terminal, all the things you might normally opt to choose VSCode for. This is with the added benefit that it it isn’t electron-based, so it offers an alternative for those with less powerful systems.
You can also disable telemetry on literally the very first page when opening Zed, and you can disable AI assistants and and similar features pretty easily.
The VC backing in combination with the choice to go open source becomes a good thing, because it means:
- Zed does not need to sell your data to advertisers/whoever else for revenue.
- The code is open source, so it can be forked if this ever changes — and users can also view the source code to confirm disabling telemetry actually disables telemetry.
It also seems like their monetization strategy is going to focus on the code collaboration side of Zed. Take a look at the quote below:
“Zed Channels is one example of such a service. It’s free for anyone today, but we intend to begin charging for private use after a beta period of experimentation.” — Nathan Sobo, CEO of Zed Industries
This makes perfect sense from a revenue and product perspective. The online and collaborative features of Zed are appealing to enterprises/big companies, and lets them monetize the editor through B2B aspects of the software while keeping the core editor free to use for everyone.
They also mention they could lean on AI integration which I’m not a massive fan of, but is undeniably rising in popularity in software development.
The good news is even if anything goes proprietary, you will still be able to build Zed from source. This is an approach some other popular applications have taken like Aseprite. Based on the annoucement though, it seems like they really don’t want to make the editor itself proprietary which is great.
One of the bigger concerns has been platform support. Zed is currently only available for MacOS which is a bit of a bummer, but they plan to release for Linux next which is absolutely ideal.
There’s quite a lot of pessimism online surrounding this — but I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt. They kept their promise on going open source which many were skeptical about (and rightly so), and I’m going to trust that they will release for Linux too. It’s also in their best interest anyway — bigger market share, and being able to secure the Linux crowd with Zed’s pretty FOSS-friendly licenses.
That’s it for this post.
I hope you enjoyed!
