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Our email yesterday was imprecise relative to our actual new Terms. To be specific:
- You must be at least 18 years old to use the Service (Zed’s AI-enabled software-as-a-service offering, including features like account creation/sign in, Zed Free and Zed Pro, and collaboration). See https://zed.dev/terms#21-eligibility. We set the threshold at 18 due to children's data privacy obligations under COPPA, equivalent international frameworks, and an increasing number of state and regional laws that extend protections to anyone under 18. Those regulations require parental consent verification, age-gated data handling, and separate retention policies for minors. Building and maintaining that infrastructure is a real cost for a small team, and getting it wrong carries regulatory risk. Setting the line at 18 lets us maintain a single privacy framework for all account holders without carve-outs.
- Zed's Software (open source code editing software) is governed by our open source licenses. In cases where the open source license can govern, it will over the Terms. See https://zed.dev/terms#24-restrictions.
If you have questions, reply to this email or reach us at legal@zed.dev.
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"Customer must be at least 18 years old to use the Service"
this pretty clearly refers to the subscription service and not to the 'downloadable software' or source code
I have tried zed multiple times and always uninstalled it after a few days because of the ugly font rendering, slow response time (!), high memory usage (!!) and being very buggy in general. And don't even get me started on their AI-first shenanigans.
This is on Linux, maybe it works better on other platforms.
That's gonna be a no from me, dawg.
Zed’s AI-enabled software-as-a-service offering (the “Service”)
Customer must be at least 18 years old to use the Service.