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Comment by cube2222 | Hacker News Reader

As I’ve said in yesterday’s thread[0], contrary to many others I find the AI integration in Zed to be extremely smooth and pleasant to use, so I’m happy they’re doubling down on this.

However, personally, I prefer to have it configured to talk directly to Anthropic, to limit the number of intermediaries seeing my code, but in general I can see myself using this in the future.

More importantly, I’m happy that they might be closing in on a good revenue stream. I don’t yet see the viability of the collaboration feature as a business model, and I was worried they’re gonna have trouble finding a way to sensibly monetize Zed and quit it at some point. This looks like a very sensible way, one that doesn’t cannibalize the open-source offering, and one that I can imagine working.

Fingers crossed, and good luck to them!

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41286612

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>However, personally, I prefer to have it configured to talk directly to Anthropic, to limit the number of intermediaries seeing my code, but in general I can see myself using this in the future.

Same. I can kind of feel OK about my code going to Anthropic, but I can't have it going through another third party as well.

This is unfortunately IT/security's worst nightmare. Thousands of excitable developers are going to be pumping proprietary code through this without approval.

(I have been daily driving Zed for a few months now - I want to try this, I'm just sceptical for the reason above.)

I really wanted to try this out with a difficult bug, as I've had Zed installed for a while and haven't actually used it. But I have no idea if I'd get in trouble for that... even though our whole team uses VSCode which I'm sure has scanned all our codebases anyway.

Add the following to your settings.json:

  "assistant": {
    "version": "2",
    "default_model": {
      "provider": "anthropic",
      "model": "claude-3-5-sonnet-20240620"
    }
  }

Once this is done, you should be able to use Anthropic if you have an API key. (This was available before today's announcement and still works today as of Zed 0.149.3)

That was a part of the reasoning of open sourcing my AI assistant/software dev project. Companies like Google have strict procedures around access to customer data. The same can't always be said about a startup racing to not run out of cash.

Also, I know some people say “just let me pay for the editor” but I don’t think that’s actually a viable path.

The editor is open-source, and it being open-source is great. Others can contribute, it generally helps adoption, it will probably help with getting people to author plugins, and it means if they go in an undesirable way, the community will be able to fork.

So without making it non-open-source, they’d need to do open-core, which is incredibly hard to pull off, as you usually end up cannibalizing features in the open-source version (even if you have contributors willing to contribute them, you block it to not sabotage your revenue stream).

I would like us as an industry to promote paying for things we use. Crazy idea, I know.

Open source is great and fun and an incredible force multiplier for the world, but when you want to do this stuff for a living, you have to charge money for it somehow, and if you're a software business, and not just software adjacent, it means charging for software.

I’m not sure if that’s clear or not from my comments, but I completely agree (and pay for JetBrains editors, amongst other tools).

Though in the case of “fundamental / ecosystem center” tools like code editors which e.g. others will build plugins for I believe there’s immense value in it being open-source.

Thus, I’m rooting for them to find a business model where they get our money without making it non-open-source.

As long as it is not via subscriptions…

Everyone goes to subscriptions, because trying to get new customers every month at a rate that pays everyone's salaries, at a typical engineering level, plus everyone else on the company, and office rental, doesn't scale, specially in developer tools where many prefer to suffer with lesser tooling than paying.

Subscriptions are only okay for me if it's done like Jetbrains does it, where you can keep the old versions permanently. Partly because it implies what has to be true for monthly payments to make sense: that the software keeps getting better and keeps getting support for various tech advances that happen and tools and databases. If I'm paying monthly for something that doesn't cost them anything then that feels illogical on my side. This should become a thing with online services too, at least let me keep some kind of upgraded version of your service after I stop paying. Something please, anything to make me feel less like a chump for having paid and then ending up with nothing in the end.

Pay-for closed-source is profitable for about a week. Then some asshole offers a shittier but free facsimile and community contributions render it good enough to kill the original.

I think we're all pretty familiar with this cycle, but there do exist durable products that don't succumb to this issue within reason and the burden rests on the original authors to find ways to create themselves a moat like any other business.

I don’t think this will ever happen. Software Engineering is fairly unique in that our tools are effectively the same thing we create (code).

If carpenters could build saws out of wood, they would probably make their own tools (and many do, for tools that can be made of wood like hand saws).

You generally have to sell goods to people who can’t make them themselves. How often do carpenters buy shelves instead of making them? How often do constructions workers hire someone else to build a shed for them?

I don’t care for closed source editors in general. My editor and its configuration are one of the most important tools I have, and I don’t want to hand someone the ability to remotely disable it. I would rather go back to using plugin-less vim, because I can at least depend on the tool.

JetBrains is probably the only one I would even consider, and I still don’t care for it (and really hate having a separate editor per-language if I don’t have to).

A lot of Zed users are developers at medium-to-large businesses, so I think full source-available with licensing is very much something they could do.

They could put the code on GitHub, allowing contributions, with a license that turns into BSD or MIT after two years, and with the caveat that you can only run the (new) code if you purchase a license key first.

In companies of reasonable size, the deterent against piracy is the existence of a license itself, the actual copy protection and its strength aren't as important. The reason those companies (mostly) don't crack software isn't that the software is hard to crack, it's that their lawyers wouldn't let them.

Sure, this would make Zed somewhat easier to crack, but I think the subset of users who wouldn't use a Zed crack if Zed was binary-only but would use one if there was source code available is very small.

But then it wouldn't be open-source anymore, would it? Making the willingness of people to contribute likely much smaller. You don't really have the safety of having an easy way to fork either, if all you can fork is a 2-year old version (which plugins are likely not compatible with anymore).

It would also (deservedly) likely anger a large part of the existing community, especially the ones most involved, like plugin authors, who put their time in assuming their contributing to an open-source ecosystem.

Thus, I believe that ship has sailed the moment they made it open-source in the first place.

My understanding of their comment is that the source is made available immediately. It’s just that you need to pay for a license to use it for the first couple years.

Yes, and open-source and source-available are two different things. The comment I responded to suggested they switch to a source-available license which falls back to an open-source license after a time period passes.

Leave it open source exactly as it is now, do not put convenient downloadable binaries up on Github. Allow me to either compile it myself or pay for the binaries?

There must be some other way to monetize open source.

Selling support or consulting services.

It just takes time to grow that.

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