Comment by freehorse

There is this big recurrent misunderstanding with zed's ToS that produces some extreme, misinformed reactions. Zed (the ide) is open source ("GPL v3 with Apache 2.0 for certain components"). The ToS are only applicable for the services they provide when you subscribe for an account and use them [0]. Some people read the ToS, think they apply just for the editor, and think that zed is stealing your source code and whatnot, because it would indeed be weird to have these ToS for just editing stuff locally, without any of the additional services provided. However, if one actually reads the ToS instead of nitpicking a paragraph, it is very clear what it is about.

Any ToS for a company that you send data to process includes similar terms that just allow it to process the data as you are expecting them to in order to provide these services. Eg for the AI tab-completion, they process part of your source code on their servers and provide a tab-completion suggestion ("derivative data"). Some people are evidently either unfamiliar about how these things work or about the data-related legalese terms used (barring any bad intentions assumed). If anything, paragraph 4.2 [1] makes it clear that any data output is owned by the user (and not by zed). This whole discussion made me read the terms and (apart from the arbitration thing imo, though not uncommon), I couldn't see any kind of dark pattern or issue.

I like zed a lot, it works great, I am definitely cautious about the fact that they have received VC money which holds me from getting "all-in", but criticism that is based on misunderstandings or on obviously factually wrong arguments is not very useful.

[0] https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/50568#issuecomm... (could be some better source than a github comment but it has been repeated many times)

[1] https://zed.dev/terms#42-customers-ownership-of-output