I've got general negative thoughts about conda, based upon $dayjob's use
of it. I always enjoy trying to build something which depends upon a
conda-ized library which has been pooly built/packaged ... yeah, good times.
As for their bait and switch, they do need to cover network costs, and
if they are making the mistake of using cloud storage for this, then
their egress/storage costs are likely significant. If you have to use
them, and really have no choice in the matter, it is better to support
them and enable them to stay in business, than let them whither and
die. The latter guarantees some future flag days where you have to
start switching out quickly.
Hence a point about a plan B ...
On 4/13/22 12:11, Prentice Bisbal via Beowulf wrote:
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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Joe Landman
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