[Beowulf] [External] Re: Anaconda distribution sowing FUD to generate sales?

[Prentice Bisbal]

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 at 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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