Following in the footsteps of Hashicorp, Hudson, etc. Zed has chosen to cash in the good will of its now substantial user base and start going to full corporate enshittification. Among other things like minimum age nonsense, they have also added binding mandatory opt-OUT arbitration.
I find such agreements very troubling, because it gives up public funded dispute resolution for private which nearly unanimously benefits larger entities, it lowers transparency to near zero, and eliminates the abilities to act as a class and to appeal. But I worry most will just accept it, as is the norm.
You can however opt out by emailing arbitration-opt-out@zed.dev with full legal name, the email address associated with your account, and a statement that you want to opt out.
I’ll just consider my days of advocating for Zed as an interesting new editor over and go back to Neovim bliss.
The CLA can never override the code license. It handles the transition of your code into their code, and what they can do with it. But once it’s published as AGPL, you or anyone else can fork it and work with it as AGPL anyway. The CLA can allow them to change the license to something different. But the AGPL published code remains published and usable under AGPL.
I’m usually fine with contributing under CLA. A CLA often make sense. Because the alternative is a hassle and lock-in to current constructs. Which can have its own set of disadvantages.
A FOSS license and CLA combination can offer reasonable good to both parties: You can be sure your contribution is published as FOSS, and they know they can continue to maintain the project with some autonomy and choices. (Choices can be better or worse for others, of course.)
I never said that you can remove a license retroactively. A CLA is an assignment of copyright from the contributor to the company. The only reason for a company to add a CLA to a project is to put a rug under the project which they will pull as soon as they gained a critical mass of users. It fundamentally undermines the social contract of open source development. These companies want to enjoy all the benefit of open source, like the market appeal and the free labour, but none of the drawbacks. A CLA is just one thing, a promise that the project will go non-free in the future.