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.
Oh, and I just head about the fork that reached 1.0 recently. Not that I use it or Zed in the first place, but I’m glad people have options to escape enshittification!
I tried Zed a little and it didn’t really click with me but after reading the project mission I’m going to give this fork a try:
I think AI integration in a code editor is a bad feature. AI makes me angry.
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.)
For those that don’t know what any of that means (like me 5 minutes ago):
Arbitration is an alternative to going to court. Instead of suing each other in front of a judge, both parties agree to have a neutral third party (an arbitrator) settle disputes privately. It’s usually faster and cheaper than traditional litigation.
The class action waiver means you give up the right to join with other users in a class action lawsuit against Zed. So if many users had the same grievance, they couldn’t band together, each person would have to resolve their dispute individually.
Why tf are they afraid of being sued or class actioned against?
I haven’t really used zed much and I’ll delete my account and uninstall, just to show them that this sucks.
Instead of suing each other in front of a judge, both parties agree to have a neutral third party (an arbitrator) settle disputes privately
The “neutral” third party is chosen by the company. So… yeah.
Could be fuck ups from AI, i saw several openings from them about integrated AI
Fun fact: these forced arbitration clauses can backfire spectacularly
Any lawyer who wants to make a shit load of money fucking over a company engaging in these kinds of abusive business practices should look at what Bucher law firm did to Valve.
Well that didn’t take long at all. 😕
I’m gonna give that fork a try today.
laughs in Emacs
It is unfortunate though, since Zed did seem to have potential. But I can’t say I’m surprised given their focus on vibe coding instead if making a good editor.
is this really a problem? if you don’t make a Zed account (this is for their paid services) you don’t have to agree to any TOS. The editor remains untouched.
This why you just stay within the realm of our pure open source.
Vim, neoVim and emacs. Lean to use in combination with other tools like tmux and you have an excellent working environment. These are tools that are contributed to by the best of the best OGs out there.
