Following in the footsteps of Hashicorp, Hudson, etc. Zed has chosen to cash in the good will of its now substantial user base and start going to full corporate enshittification. Among other things like minimum age nonsense, they have also added binding mandatory opt-OUT arbitration.
I find such agreements very troubling, because it gives up public funded dispute resolution for private which nearly unanimously benefits larger entities, it lowers transparency to near zero, and eliminates the abilities to act as a class and to appeal. But I worry most will just accept it, as is the norm.
You can however opt out by emailing [email protected] with full legal name, the email address associated with your account, and a statement that you want to opt out.
I’ll just consider my days of advocating for Zed as an interesting new editor over and go back to Neovim bliss.
WTF? According to the project page on github, at least some of it is AGPL. It can’t have restrictive “terms of service” on top of that!
Oh, yes it can. The license only changes what other people than the owner may do. It’s the rights and conditions they give you.
For most projects that doesn’t matter because there are several owners of the code base. Every single person who contributed can enforce these rights on their part. However, to contribute to Zed you have to sign a cla. Signing away all rights and ownership of your contribution. So they have all the rights and can do whatever they want.
They could close source everything tomorrow without any consequence and sell you a feature you made yourself.
That’s all true except for that last paragraph - the rights and conditions they gave you to existing code are irrevocable, so you’ll continue to be able to use the last open source version indefinitely, including the feature you made yourself. It’s just that they can release new versions and not publish the source code of their additions, even if that new release also includes a feature you made yourself.
(I’m not a lawyer, but still.)
They have some functionality for which you can login, and only at login are you asked to agree to the terms. Presumably you can just use the offline functionality of the editor just fine without agreeing to anything other than the AGPL.
This is perfectly fine to me. The only features that require an account are AI and chat, two features which make perfect sense to have an account for.
I personally don’t even use these features. In fact, I have this in my zed settings.
{ "disable_ai": true, "title_bar": { "show_sign_in": false } }Let me introduce you to the magical concept of the CLA. It means they can do whatever they want with the project but you can not. You should never contribute to CLA projects.
The CLA can never override the code license. It handles the transition of your code into their code, and what they can do with it. But once it’s published as AGPL, you or anyone else can fork it and work with it as AGPL anyway. The CLA can allow them to change the license to something different. But the AGPL published code remains published and usable under AGPL.
I’m usually fine with contributing under CLA. A CLA often make sense. Because the alternative is a hassle and lock-in to current constructs. Which can have its own set of disadvantages.
A FOSS license and CLA combination can offer reasonable good to both parties: You can be sure your contribution is published as FOSS, and they know they can continue to maintain the project with some autonomy and choices. (Choices can be better or worse for others, of course.)
I never said that you can remove a license retroactively. A CLA is an assignment of copyright from the contributor to the company. The only reason for a company to add a CLA to a project is to put a rug under the project which they will pull as soon as they gained a critical mass of users. It fundamentally undermines the social contract of open source development. These companies want to enjoy all the benefits of open source, like the market appeal and the free labour, but none of the drawbacks. A CLA is just one thing, a promise that the project will go non-free in the future.
I suspect they draw a distinction between using their built binary and logged in services like collaboration from the editor code itself, but iinal.