Non-AGPL subset

[bjackman]

My Big Tech employer is terrified of the AGPL and totally forbids installing AGPL software even on our workstations.

I can't really adopt an editor that I can't use at work so that basically means no Zed for me.

Well, IIUC only parts of Zed are AGPL ("GPL for the editor, AGPL for server-side components"). It's not clear to me exactly what that entails (does "server-side" include the remote development server or is that referring more to collaboration features?) but if makes technical sense, it would be great to provide a way to install only the GPL components.

I dunno how common AGPL-phobia is but I doubt my employer strays very far from the mainstream on this so giving people a non-AGPL option might unlock a nontrivial amount of new users.

[bjackman]

It's not clear to me exactly what that entails (does "server-side" include the remote development server or is that referring more to collaboration features?)

I think this is the "server side" for remoting and it's listed as being GPL so that's a good sign.

[mikayla-maki]

@bjackman The only AGPL code is here, our collaboration server implementation: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/tree/main/crates/collab. That code never touches your work station or the server we start for remote development. Every Zed binary (by us) is Apache/GPL :)

[bjackman]

That's good news!

The Flathub page (which is not maintained by Zed Industries IIUC) says "This app is developed in the open by an international community, and released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later, Apache License 2.0, GNU General Public License v3.0 or later" - I guess that's just reflecting the metadata from Github or Cargo or something, and I assume it's basically just wrong. Let me know if there's any reason to think otherwise!

[bjackman]

which is not maintained by Zed Industries IIUC

No wait, this is wrong, looks like it's here:

zed/crates/zed/resources/flatpak/zed.metainfo.xml.in

Line 5 in d57f593

<project_license>AGPL-3.0-or-later and Apache-2.0 and GPL-3.0-or-later</project_license>

Would it be accurate to just remove the AGPL bit from there?

[mikayla-maki]

I believe so