Zed is a code editor. Its makers state their mission as building the world’s most advanced code editor and getting it into the hands of millions of developers. On January 24, 2024 they announced that Zed had become an open source project, with its code published on GitHub.
The code was released under copyleft licenses so that improvements benefit the whole community: the GPL for the editor itself and the AGPL for its server-side components. GPUI, the UI framework that powers Zed, was released under the Apache 2 license so that others can use it to build high-performance desktop applications and distribute them under any license. The announcement described this as open-sourcing 100% of the code written up to that point, while leaving open that proprietary products for commercial and enterprise use might still be offered, intended to remain a small fraction of the code compared with what is open-sourced. Zed’s website offers it for macOS, Windows and Linux.
Features
Alongside the open-source announcement, Zed introduced Zed Channels, a feature for writing code together in real time by sharing a link. The team said it would use Channels to run Fireside Hacks, public sessions in which it works on Zed live together with whoever joins.
Business Model
Rather than selling a proprietary editor, the team said it intends to sell services that integrate with the editor to make developers and teams more productive. Channels was given as one example — free at the time, with charging for private use planned after a beta period — and providing server-side compute to power AI features was named as another monetization scheme the team saw gaining traction. The team also said it would never show banner ads in the editor.