Alex,
That's exactly my interpretation of the terms after I read them, but
since I'm not a lawyer, I recommended the user who was contacted to
consult our legal dept or purchasing, since they have more experience
with things like this.
Whenever I see moves like this, I immediately think of Red Hat, and
their shenanigans to make money off of Linux. First they killed of Red
Hat Linux when RHEL wasn't profitable enough, then they took over CentOS
and effectively made it so it couldn't compete with RHEL.
Prentice Bisbal
Senior HPC Engineer
Computational Sciences Department
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
https://cs.pppl.gov
https://www.pppl.gov
On 4/13/22 12:43 PM, Alex Chekholko wrote:
Hi Prentice,
I believe their first goal is to cover the cost of outbound
bandwidth since they are a commercial entity and everyone pulls
packages from them and cloud egress is expensive. So their new terms
of service focus on people who mirror their repos. If you're another
commercial entity mirroring their repos and presumably
producing another commercial product based on that, you should pay
them something. All academic use is still free. Primarily they are
focused on other companies that have commercial products that have
anaconda under the hood.
Regards,
AlexI find
On Wed, Apr 13, 2022 at 9:11 AM Prentice Bisbal via Beowulf
<beowulf@beowulf.org> wrote:
Recently, one of my users go this e-mail from a commercial account
rep at anaconda.com <http://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 <http://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 <http://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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