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. Itβs 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.
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.