Were excited to announce that Zed is now an open source project. The code for Zed itself is available under a copyleft license to ensure any improvements will benefit the entire community (GPL for the editor, AGPL for server-side components). GPUI, the UI framework that powers Zed, is distributed under the Apache 2 license, so that you can use it to build high-performance desktop applications and distribute them under any license you choose. Motivations Why are we doing this? Most importantly, we believe that making Zed open source will make it the best product. Our mission is to build the worlds most advanced code editor and get it into the hands of millions of developers. Theres a ton of surface area on that problem, and well need all the help we can get. Considering that all of Zeds users are programmers, it makes the most sense sense to open Zed to the maximum pool of talent. On a more selfish level, we also think going open source will be a lot more fun. One of our favorite aspects of software is connecting with people. Were not only proud of what weve built, but also of how weve built it. We want to share Zeds inner beauty with all of you, and were confident well learn a lot from you in the process to make it even better. Introducing Fireside Hacks Motivated by our desire to connect with you all on a human level, were launching a new Zed feature called Zed Channels, which will make it easy for developers anywhere in the world to write code together in real time just by sharing a link. Starting tomorrow, well be using Channels to run a new program called Fireside Hacks, in which well be working on Zed live in a public channel, together with whoever shows up. Well be experimenting with different formats, but were hoping these regular sessions give us all an opportunity to get to know each other better, beyond whats possible in a static pull request. Come join the experiment to ask questions, make suggestions, and code with us in real time. Were looking forward to meeting you! Wait... Doesnt Cash Rule Everything Around Me? We strongly believe that the best way to build and maintain the worlds best editor is by associating it with a sustainable business model. Its the only way we can continue to invest in a full-time team to spearhead development. Some may wonder whether making Zed open source undermines this objective. Weve thought about this a lot, and we dont think that openness is at odds with commercial success. Rather than selling you a proprietary editor, wed much prefer to sell you services that seamlessly integrate with your editor to make you and your team more productive. Zed Channels is one example of such a service. Its free for anyone today, but we intend to begin charging for private use after a beta period of experimentation. Providing server-side compute to power AI features is another monetization scheme were seeing getting traction. Today, were open sourcing 100% of the code weve written so far. In the future, however, we may still offer proprietary products targeting commercial and enterprise use cases, though we always intend for proprietary code to be a tiny fraction compared to the code we open source. We also intend to ensure our need to generate revenue never interferes with your need to write software. Were never going to show...
