Recently, one of my users go this e-mail from a commercial account rep
at anaconda.com:
Hi [User]
I'm reaching out because I've noticed we are one of [Employer's
Name]'s preferred tools and also to offer guidance in navigating our
new Anaconda Terms of Service, as there are changes for the commercial
use of Anaconda. Based off my research, [Employer's Name]is mirroring
quite a few packages in the past few months.
We remain deeply dedicated to OSS, and that cost is funded by the long
tail of our enterprise products and users. In short, we changed our
Terms of Service to prohibit commercial use of our Public Facing Repo
(repo.anaconda.com <http://repo.anaconda.com>) channel without a paid
license.
We'd like to discuss how your organization can remain compliant and
discuss some options moving forward.
Are you or someone in your IT department available to chat? Book time
with me [link to online scheduling service
removed]<https://anaconda.getoutreach.com/c/Cody_Foxwell>
Cheers,
[salesperson's name]
Have any of you received an e-mail like this?
Since I work at an academic, government research site, I don't think we
fall into the commercial category, so I'm pretty sure we're safe, but I
still don't like this attempt to monetize open-source software like
this. I'm not an open-source zealot like RMS, but I don't like when
people take open-source software, try to monetize it it like this.
What's interesting is their approach here - they are not trying to keep
open-source software from your directly - they're saying you can't use
their *repo* to get that software. So you can have your open-source
software, but to get it from the dealer to your house, you need to pay a
toll to use the roads.
I don't like this because many people now rely on conda, and conda only
has value because of the repo. If people using conda knew that this
might be a problem, perhaps they would have stuck with the python.org
distribution of Python and pip.
The other think I don't like, is that you can't find any of this
information on the anaconda.com website. Even after knowing these terms
and conditions applied, I couldn't find any warnings about this on the
product pages for the Anaconda Distribution. It's as if they're
deliberately hiding this information from potential downloaders of
Anaconda. I only found it by going directly to
https://repo.anaconda.com, where they do have links prominently displayed.
This seems like a trap to me. You download anaconda, completely unaware
of these terms and conditions, and then use conda to install the
packages you need, unknowingly violating their license..
Your thoughts?
Prentice
--
Prentice
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