For a VC-backed company, this will never ever generate enough revenue growth. So, the real answer is: "If all goes well, we will keep raising VC money and get acquired and shutdown / butchered in 5-10 years".
Like Bluesky, this monetization plan they present is just something to calm down the haters and sceptics. But if you think for two seconds, it does not make sense.
It might happen the way you describe, or, if they get more popular, then may try to think harder and offer more paid options. Now they're in a growth stage - they need to convince the largest possible number of developers they should switch from VS Code, and that is already a difficult task.
I know, this is the standard VC playbook: First growth at all costs to get everyone into the ecosystem, then pull up the net and monetize. The latter phase is usually when all the subscriptions, value-add nag screens, data sharing agreements and other enshittification goodies pop up.
And how would it work otherwise? You can't perpetually offer a product for free (in all senses of the word) AND satisfy exponential ROI expectations at the same time.
If this is what's going on here, I'm worried what the "monetization" phase will entail.
The other option I see is being owned by a behemoth like Microsoft, in VSCode case, who can pay millions per month in engineering salaries and PaaS, while keeping it free.
They are so big they can monetize it using Copilot or not even monetize it properly, just to get good faith from Developers, Developers, Developers.
No, the other option is something like Sublime Text that has a small team working on it and is paid for by a very fair one-off payment by the customer.
Well as an end user this is pretty much OK right, so long as you are aware of the deal? VC funded companies have subsidized and then abandoned a lot of useful OSS code over the years.
Whenever you encounter a VC backed open source project you know the rug pull will come eventually. It doesn't make the code they have written any less useful. If the tool is good enough then it will be forked and live on.
No, it's not ok. It fucks the whole market by subsidizing the growth with VC money. Either a big company will buy them, consolidating their power, or they will IPO and the VCs will cash out and let the public bear the cost. It fucks the customers who are not as well-informed about this as you are. In summary, it fucking sucks.
This seems pretty optimistic to me. I can't imagine any company I've worked for paying for those things. Especially because they're only going to be useful if everyone uses Zed which is unlikely.
Indeed seems very uncommon where I am, even the IntelliJ’s are more often pirated than paid for.
From my perspective it is very weird to expect to beat MS (who produces two great IDE’s, not one) on their own game with this approach to dev.
I’m not saying it’s impossible to have the most important features replicated, but, c’mon, this is software, it breaks as it builds and some things are not possible
Overnight even if you have the worlds top top top talent around.
But, you also have to be better than what’s freely available by enough to get someone to pay for it. Having a good product isn’t good enough, you have to be significantly better.
Dev tooling is a notoriously difficult space to make money. Free tools tend to win because if a tool costs money, a developer is just as likely to write their own version. (For better or worse)
Zed's vision is that the editor is free and you're paying basically for Teams-lite.
If you're a big company, you're already using a service like Teams, Slack, Zoom, etc.
If you're a small company, then there's free alternatives like Discord.
And say you want to talk to someone other than a programmer, then you'd need something else anyway. Because a project manager wouldn't need an IDE installed.
That’s the thing. Whatever editor I finally migrate from neovim to I’ll likely donate to.
I get so much insane value from open source and companies building for the platforms that I use that I’m happy to pay for them especially for small shops of really passionate hackers like the folks behind Zed.
I don't have much hope in anything replacing it for me. Zed does a lot right but feels very very far away and with a weird focus (from my perspective).
>How some people prefer manual is probably one of the mysteries I'll take to grave with myself.
When I find myself thinking like that I try to come up with generous analogies to try and position myself in a similar mindset. With manual transmission the advantage seems to be fine grained control over the engine at the cost of more complexity and additional work. This fine grained control may be imperceptible or totally unnecessary for some people. However, I run Linux for similar reasons and enjoy tinkering with it. I also tend to prefer tools that target power users at the cost of complexity. So, even if I'm not a gearhead myself, I can easily understand the preference for manual transmission by others.
We do know that the open web consitutes the bulk of the trainig data, although we don't get to know the specific webpages that got used. Plus some more selected sources, like books, of which again we only know that those are books but not which books were used. So it's just a matter of probability that there was a good amount of SEO spam as well.
There is a lot fire directed at Mozilla on HN. I'm not saying I support or can make sense of all of their decisions but I'd love for someone in the criticizers camp to explain what steps they would take to make Mozilla and the continued development of Firefox a financially sustainable and independent endeavour.
> but I'd love for someone in the criticizers camp to explain what steps they would take to make Mozilla and the continued development of Firefox a financially sustainable and independent endeavour.
Let me give them money. Either straight-up take donations to fund firefox development, or sell a "Firefox Pro" that doesn't have these stupid anti-features. But don't refuse to take money from users and complain that because you don't take money from users you're "forced" to screw them over.
I have some ideas of varying quality. Others have been mentioned in the thread.
Really, though, it’s not like me or any of the commenters are being paid millions a year to fix these problems. If I were being paid $6,903,089 I feel like I might be well-equipped to fix them.
They've been pulling in half a billion dollars per year for 15 years. They should have budgeted to invest part of that money to build a development trust fund.
Could it be them disregarding users preferences over and over again or claiming to stand for privacy while siphoning your data at every opportunity. Sure will be hard finding an example of that behavior.
It's been a few years since I last watched his stuff. He always had that crazy genius vibe, similar to Terry Davis but but not as unhinged and much more friendly and wholesome. I'm fascinated how these individuals that are clearly immensely gifted with rational thought are also religious fanatics. How do they rationalize it? I can understand believing in a supreme being but it also being the one described in bible seems difficult to rationalize.
If you're a schizo, it's probably pretty easy to rationalize: you've heard your god talk to you and tell you these things. It's easy to go "You're obviously crazy, this can't have happened!" from the outside looking in, but it's far harder to reject your own experiences out of hand as obviously false.
Doubly so because the types of experiences you get tend to be very hard to disprove. It's usually not something like "There's a yellow demonic entity running around deep in the valley by the mountain" where it's something that can be checked and explained, like actually just a moose who got tangled up in a yellow wintercoat or something, and is running around irritated trying to get it off. Rather it tends to be more "God is speaking to me through my mind, and only does so to special people" or "These people are trying to make me be as miserable as I was before I found God by making me reject him, they must be servants of Satan".
Really, if anything, I would say gifted people are probably way more likely to become religious fanatics if they have these experience. We do not have a good explanation for these things (you're sick in the head, something something dopamine does not work too well for otherwise perfectly functional and rational people), and the explanations that we do have must more or less be taken on faith. You need to trust that the person explaining these things to you is both more capable of judging the situation than you are, and has your best interests in mind. For most gifted people, the chance of both of these being true in any particular situation is abyssmally small.
This applies even more so in mental healthcare, where we're practically at the same stage of technological advancement as we were when trepanation and bloodletting were state of the art in physical medicine. We have a long way to go before we can truly make the "You're crazy!" explanation stick for those who are used to living in a world that is inevitably wrong about most things, whether subtly or overtly. Really, if you're used to being the smartest guy in the room, what choice do you have? What choice do you have but to trust yourself? Yes, you might be delusional and wrong, but you know the world at large is delusional and wrong on countless subjects as well. Why trust them more than you trust yourself, when just about every single experience you've had in life has fed into your belief that you are fundamentally better at judging reality than most people are?
The term you are after, used to describe authors noted for their use of language is prose stylist. Given your examples I think you'll adore Moby-Dick; what Melville pulls off there is astonishing.
It's certainly worth it, especially if you have some appreciation for the craft of writing, a love for words and the English language and the patience to take things slow and put the effort to really understand what you're reading. After the clouds clear and you can see what he is doing a monument reveals itself and there is this feeling of astonishment that a human was able to create such a thing.
The second half of the book (chapters 10 to 18 although page-wise it's more like two thirds) is especially satisfying. Each chapter is written in a vastly different style: imitation of music, a romantic novel, a play, the historical development of style in the English language, how a bad writer writes, a technical text, and a couple of others.
It's challenging and might not be satisfying if you're looking for plot (there is none). I suggest to read a chapter and then the accompanying text in https://www.ulyssesguide.com
>I think the fundamental assumption of the analysis that there are two mutually exclusive groups, 'pro-Israel' and 'pro-Palestine' is flawed. It is possible to simultaneously support the interests of Palestinian and Israeli civilians
That would be a nuanced view. The reality is that most people and especially most people who post their views online are not capable of seeing things that way.
We envision Zed as a free-to-use editor, supplemented by subscription-based, optional network features, such as:
We plan to offer our collaboration features to open source teams, free of charge.reply