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Free software is about freedom. Restricting it from anyone means it's not free. There is no requirement that we must create free software but if it's called free I think it should always have the basic qualities of freedom; not only when it fits our purposes and our values.
There are already so many ways (and reasons) not to do free or open source software. People who find them convincing are using them. People who don't generally are not.
It seems like the author of the post is just potentially having a change of mind from one side to the other, which barely even seems noteworthy.
> There are already so many ways (and reasons) not to do free or open source software. People who find them convincing are using them.
To be honest, I don't think the space between GPL/MIT and commercial closed source is explored enough. I'm aware there's a few examples of things in between, but they are not common knowledge and they don't satisfy everyone. It is not a space that is easy to search online for established wisdom and comparisons in.
Basically every argument has been made before, but there's still 10,000 people a day who are just finding out about it for the first time (https://xkcd.com/1053/)
Clearly this sparked enough discussion and upvotes to make it to the front page of Hacker News, so people found it valuable.
> Point the author makes is precisely that they don't want to do free software, and they'd like to convince you not to do free software
Sure, but they are not suggesting any practical alternative by issuing a license that essentially boils down to "Please don't use this if you are evil".
Saying that the author has an almost childlike understanding of what the word "evil" means is something of a slur against actual children - I've got a 6 year old who understands subjective morals better than this author does.
It's a choice for the authors to make based on what type of free they believe in. I think free under MIT and GPL are two different philosophies on how you see "free".
MIT: free for anyone, do whatever you want
GPL: free if you also make your software free
AGPL: GPL but SaaS can't circumvent the requirement to make your software free
I see why principled open source proponents would select GPL or AGPL. They don't just want their code to be used freely by others, they also believe more software should be free and using GPL helps with that.
GPL restrictions don't make software under the GPL not "free" as in freedom. Just a different philosophy.
I like the GPL and think its "virality" is both clever and a worthwhile social goal, but I think it's misleading to call it "free". It directly restricts possible usage of the software in question -- yes, in a way that's designed to increase another kind of freedom, but it restricts nonetheless.
FWIW I have the same quarrel with people who talk about a country being "free". To my mind, a truly free country would have no laws. It would be a horrible place, because the restrictions that laws place on us tend to make things better for everyone (we may disagree on this law or that law, but some laws, like "Don't kill someone without a very good reason", would have >99% popular support anywhere in the world).
"More free" does not necessarily imply "better"; it could be better or worse. I'd like to shift usage of the words "free" and "freedom" in this direction, but think it's probably a lost cause as the words are too emotionally charged with connotations of "good".
> The biggest limitation is that there's no support for arbitrary entrypoints to the graph, because pylock.toml includes a fixed marker for each package entry rather than recording a graph of dependencies.
That figures, their lead platform was the Mac where HiDPI is totally ubiquitous, so their renderer probably has no provisions for subpixel font rendering.
While I do not doubt that there are people who experience this on some monitor/OS combinations, I have used zed on basic 1080p and 1440p 24" monitors with no issue. Sometimes I have general issues with some monitors in macos, which is usually due to some super-resolution/sharpness setting on the monitor itself that I need to adjust, but nothing specific to zed. All I say is that these issues are far from universal with non-hidpi monitors.
As I said, I do notice when it is blurry, and in such a case it is a problem with anything that is rendered on that monitor not just zed. As I said, this does not happen "on any monitor" that is not hidpi. I use multiple operating systems on my day to day work, so I am not as brainwashed by apple as to not notice when such rendering issues arise.
I know some people have bad experiences with 1440p and macos for some reason, but I haven't had any such experience that I could not fix. So all these are not universal. Some people act as if any monitor below 200dpi will look terrible on macsos. This is definitely not the case.
Other operating systems have three times the horizontal resolution when rendering fonts. It’s simply not possible to fix it on macOS because they removed subpixel rendering. It’s absolutely true that macOS fonts look substantially more blurry than fonts on other operating systems that implement subpixel rendering when you’re using a 1440p monitor.
This discussion goes back twenty years, with Apple going for preserving the original typeface appearance over crispness. It depends what you value the most and is entirely subjective.
1) How much font hinting to apply. More hinting changes the shape to make glyphs line up better with pixels so that less antialiasing is required. macOS prefers very light hinting to preserve shapes at the cost of blurriness. This is what you are talking about.
2) Subpixel rendering. This effectively triples the horizontal resolution when rendering fonts, and does not affect the shape at all. Fonts look dramatically better on normal dpi displays when using it. macOS removed support for this many years ago. This is what I'm talking about.
While this is probably annoying, I have to imagine that non-hidpi displays are becoming rarer and rarer. It's probably not a great idea to spend a lot of work on a feature that will only ever see declining use.
My guess: their shaders or text rendering don't account for sub-pixel anti-aliasing, which is critical to getting decent text rendering on low pixel density displays.
If they'd used Skia (which is what Electron and Chromium use), they would've got this for free. Instead they tried to reinvent the world and didn't realise how big the world was.
As far as I can figure out, the root issue is even simpler than that. Their hinter is broken. The edges of characters aren't aligned with the pixel grid, so there's lots of fuzzy/blurry looking text.
I love how we just reinvent the wheel again, and again, and again, and again...
MacOS native apps have had great sub-pixel rendering all along, but I guess since we have to develop everything in Electron now it's time to reimplement all the exiting functionality.
> MacOS native apps have had great sub-pixel rendering all along
Apple removed subpixel anti-aliasing in Mojave, seven years ago, because it's not necessary on the HiDPI/Retina displays they ship as standard. They still do greyscale anti-aliasing but that's not the same thing as subpixel.
> because it's not necessary on the HiDPI/Retina displays they ship as standard.
I disagree. Subpixel anti-aliasing triples the available horizontal resolution, and makes text crisper. The algorithms are known and regardless of the density it should always be applied to text and vector graphics elements.
The RGB stripe layout is so useful that OLED manufacturers are moving to it in 2026, away from the long-derided PenTile where magenta/green fringing is seen even on the densest displays.
In fact rendering on macOS is completely broken, and I don't know how people stand by it. At any scaling factor selected that is not a perfect factor of the actual hardware resolution (the 'looks like' value in Settings), the final framebuffer is scaled and interpolated to the display resolution, and everything is noticeably more blurry.
Windows has had some form of hardware-independent rendering since Windows 7, and proper pixel density control arrived in Windows 8.
Subpixel rendering is effective but it's also a massive pain in the ass to maintain, especially if you want to take full advantage of the GPU. Microsoft has kept it around for much longer but even they are steadily moving away, bits and pieces of the Win11 UI render with greyscale AA regardless of system settings because their newer GUI toolkits don't even attempt to support subpixel fonts.
That said, for something like a text editor where fonts are central the entire application and the worst subpixel edge cases like animation are unlikely to come up, it's maybe not unreasonable to ask them to go the extra mile. It's going to be a sticking point on Windows and Linux for a long time if they don't.
Top of my head switching between IntelliJ and Zed:
- Git UI is extremely barebones with no support for other VCS
- No merge tool or side-by-side diffs
- Configuration is all JSON
- Would be nice having a full file tree for the search editor instead of just the list; having the functionality split between a tab and the outline panel is quite clunky.
- Ability to move panels (files/git/console/debugger/etc) into standalone windows or other configurations (multiple docks per side, multiple copies of the same panel linked to a specific tab).
Zed is basically a slightly more featured text editor, so it does a good job when I just want to open something quickly and do small edits. So it's really replacing Sublime Text.
But I find myself hopping out to other tools when I'm using Zed which wasn't really common with IntelliJ. So I still want to use a proper IDE for proper development work.
Yeah, no, I tried that thinking it was going to be the JetBrains merge as a standalone product and it simply does not have the three-way sauce. Sublime doesn't even offer any way I can view a live base->left or base->right view as I do the merge does it?
Curious as someone dabbling with building an editor: what do you prefer? A different configuration language? A GUI? How do you save and sync settings? Just with JetBrains account sync?
> Ability to move panels (files/git/console/debugger/etc) into standalone windows
Is Zed's "zoom in" feature (shift-escape) that quickly maximises the active pane (excluding the file browser/git pane) enough? Or are you looking for the separate window experience of IntelliJ? (e.g. JetBrains lets you pop-out the commit window, I believe, which can be nice since once you close it you're back in the editor with nothing to switch or rearrange.)
> Curious as someone dabbling with building an editor: what do you prefer? A different configuration language? A GUI? How do you save and sync settings? Just with JetBrains account sync?
Really just a GUI for editing, the storage format can still be JSON and synced/backed up however you handle text files.
It just really nice having settings grouped by categories, with dropdowns for possible values, indicators for changes from default values or values overridden by project settings, search/hide/filters, and tooltips for what it does.
Right now the experience with Zed is: open the settings file, open the default settings file for documentation, and basically use search and copy-paste magic value strings/int/float/nulls into the right nested object/key.
> Is Zed's "zoom in" feature (shift-escape) that quickly maximises the active pane (excluding the file browser/git pane) enough? Or are you looking for the separate window experience of IntelliJ? (e.g. JetBrains lets you pop-out the commit window, I believe, which can be nice since once you close it you're back in the editor with nothing to switch or rearrange.)
Really the separate window experience (including the file browser/git pane). Really nice having the git panel just open on a window so you can quickly glance at changed files and quickly jump back to them for more editing. Or having search results able to spawn tabs in another pane/window so you don't have to keep switching back to search or rearranging the tab after opening the file from it.
Or even just expanding the workspace across monitors. Right now you can't even move tabs into its own window or across windows.
Yes, a GUI for settings is nice if only for one thing: so there can be a search box that you can use to search over all the settings to find what you need in a pinch. It's a lot friendlier if I can do something like "Open Settings > Ctrl+F > 'Font'" or whatever than having to go find the manual and look it up.
I don't care about the configuration language so much personally (though JSON is of course pretty lame in a lot of ways for that task.)
People are bringing up a lot of sophisticated stuff. Honestly for me it would just be a more flexible panel system that lets me see eg: File Explorer, Git UI, AI mode, etc, all at the same time.
I can’t really pin down the reason but somehow vscode just feels a bit more „balanced“ to me - the font sizes, little borders, icons and details, it’s more consistent.
Git: IntelliJ is miles ahead. And we’re talking about essential features like three-may merge panel, diffing 2 files, diffing same file between branches, diffing folders, etc
Tests:. Zed is bare bones compared to IntelliJ (rerun failed tests, export list of failures, go to failed lines easily etc
The AI stuff is cool but it won’t get me to switch from PyCharm.
Wow. This might be the 1st time i've seen someone comment negatively regarding UI performance. Zed is one of the fastest programs i use. I used to laugh when seeing them market fps and such, but yeesh it's fast
> I found Copilot tab completion completion to be VERY slow in Zed, for some reason.
> Zed still takes a relatively long time to start on my old desktop. I thought something was wrong but no, it is just THAT slow
> I have tried it out and by default it was so slow as to be unusable. After discovering it required some customization in /etc (because it's the only GUI application that fails to recognize my GPU on a very popular distro with next to zero customization, because I game a lot on Linux - weird how that's a me problem and not a Zed problem) it got better, but still noticeably slower than VS Code.
> I mean, good AI tab completion feels like a super power. Zed’s is not that good. It’s slow and normally not at all what I want.
> Zed tab is a lot worse in comparison (partly because it’s slow)
> In my personal experience I couldn't use Zed for editing python. Firstly, when navigating in a large python repository, looking up references was extremely slow (sometimes on the order of minutes).
> All I'm saying is that contrary to what someone else said about the software being "fast" I tried it and at startup, it was unusably slow.
> Tried using zed on Linux (pop os, Nvidia) several months ago, was terribly slow, ~1s to open right click context window.
> Zed is as close as it gets, I also use it, but it is still slow and cumbersome sometimes.
I'll stop here. There are other 4 pages of comments to pick anecdotes from, in this simple search alone.
It is a feature that they control. Whether it comes from the model, a bad prompt, a bad provider or a bug in their implementation is their responsibility (especially considering you have to pay per-request AI features).
There are tons of complains about zed performance there.
Do you think messages like this are talking about VSCode performance?
> In my personal experience I couldn't use Zed for editing python. Firstly, when navigating in a large python repository, looking up references was extremely slow (sometimes on the order of minutes).
Smoothness and frames per second is the core of why they were building a very optimized editor. Not sure if it is just your machine that it is not leveraging the right bits.
For me the extension ecosystems is something I really like about VSCode, but that is an entirely different matter.
This could be an issue with GPU drivers. I experienced some incompatibility with GPU kernel drivers that allowed Zed to crash the whole window manager during text selection.
There's a reason everyone writes their GUI apps in Electron nowadays. Browser have spent 30 years figuring out fast rendering, it's hard to beat that, even with native code.
I have no idea what they're talking about. Maybe they're used to a smooth scroll animation in VS Code or something? Zed feels snappier/lighter in just about every way to me.
No kidding. It is /so/ fast. It has remote development like VS Code, and most of the features I use, so it's my main thing now. Claude Code was the only thing that made me wince, since I wondered if I was living in the dark ages. VS Code of course has many more extensions, but I don't use that many.
Maybe unfairly but quite disappointed at this development.
This sentence crystalises open source:
> "Unfortunately over the years there have been cases of people forking the project in the attempt to set up a competing service."
You make something for everyone. And they may use it as they please. This is what open means. Did the author make something open source with the hope that nobody would actually use the gift that they made?
Mataroa [1] also started with MIT license (directly inspired by bear blog) and it subsequently changed as well but to Affero GPL instead.
We’re an early stage blockchain startup building the next generation of decentralized financial infrastructure. Our novel architecture provides more than 10x better performance than competitors while completely avoiding any centralized party (or leader) having an edge over other participants, eradicating MEV issues, and enabling fairer markets.
Backed by a16z crypto and 1kx.
Hiring: Backend Engineer (with trading systems experience), Business Development Lead, Content & Growth Strategist
Apply here: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/pod-network?utm_source=OqA8Z7ojl3
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