Anaconda puts the squeeze on data scientists now deemed to be terms-of-service violators Research and academic organizations are just now finding out that they will have to pay for software made by Anaconda, when for years these groups were under the impression it could be used at no cost. That realization follows the data science biz broadening its pursuit of what it sees as violators of its shifting terms-of- …
I think it's mostly inertia keeping most users still using it. Anaconda originated when Windows and Mac OS users didn't have simple installation options like Linux users did with their integrated package management. Conda and the Anaconda repos gave Windows and Mac users a package manager and a set of packages that worked with it.
With PIP and Pypi (the official Python package manager and repo) now existing, most of the reasons for most users to use Anaconda have gone away. However, lots of existing users keep on using Anaconda because it's what they're used to rather than because they actually need to.
What Anaconda still offers is a managed service for companies whose IT departments don't want to give their employees free rein to install whatever they want from Pypi or, for Linux users, from their distro's repos. There may also be some packages that Anaconda builds that are built with different options than those available elsewhere.
If companies find that outsourcing to Anaconda is cheaper than doing it in house, or just don't want to give their employees permission to install from Pypi, then they should be prepared to pay for that service. I don't personally have a lot of sympathy for companies that want to outsource IT functions and then complain that the outsourcing service provider have the temerity to want to be paid for their services.
"miniconda" [1] is the official installer for anaconda. "miniconda" allows setting the priority install channel to conda-forge [2], which means it will install any given package from conda-forge, and only fallback to anaconda if that package is not available on conda-forge (in which case it is possibly subject to licensing). However, "conda-forge" has it's own installer "miniforge" [3] which only installs packages from the conda-forge repository, non of which are licensed, but also has a smaller range than the anaconda repository. So using miniforge guarantees no accidental license violations, but using miniconda with conda-forge set as the priority channel does not.
Ironically, the conda-foge repository is also hosted by Anaconda [4]. Quote from a 2022 interview former CEO Peter Wang in Datanami -- Others have threatened to abandon Anaconda and use other Python packages, including Conda Forge, a GitHub-based community that distributes individual components in the Conda package manager. That last one gets a chuckle out of Wang. “They don’t realize Conda Forge is hosted on our infrastructure,” he says. “I pay $80,000 to $100,000 [per month] to support the download volume of Conda Forge and the software infrastructure.” [4]
That article [4] is definitely good background reading for this El Reg article - there is a lot of information in there. Former CEO Peter Wang seems like a good guy - he said “The Python community is coming at this form I think maybe too limited of a perspective in terms of what it takes to sustain the ecosystem for the long run,” Wang says. “People just don’t think about it. So every time someone PyPI installs, Conda installs something, if they actually think about how did this free value show up? There’s a lot of maintainers working on nights and weekends. And that’s not sustainable. And I don’t think anyone really wants that either.”.
So why is Peter Wang not CEO now, and what is driving this new haphazard and fuzzy approach to licensing fees? Is it a sincere attempt to pay Anaconda employees a fair wage for fair hours, or is it runup to an IPO to generate a windfall for a hedgefund and few lottery winners with little thought for sustainability? Or more confusingly some mixture of the two? Just be aware, conda-forge might need new funding for a new host in the future.
[1] https://repo.continuum.io/miniconda/Miniconda3-latest-Linux-x86_64.sh miniconda3.sh
[2] /opt/conda/bin/conda config --add channels conda-forge
[3] https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge/releases/latest/download/Miniforge3-Linux-x86_64.sh
[4] https://www.datanami.com/2022/04/18/anacondas-commercial-fee-is-paying-off-ceo-says/#
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>With PIP and Pypi (the official Python package manager and repo) now existing, most of the reasons for most users to use Anaconda have gone away.
One use of conda (that seems to be less well known) is to create conda environments.
You can have multiple separate python+libs installations that are completely isolated but simple and ligthweight compared to a Docker container / VM etc.
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I've been urging my Python students to get and install Anaconda as an easy way to get the language, a nice editor (spyder), and many modules in one convenient package. It sounds like we're still okay for now, but I can't help wondering how long that will last.
These are newbies and non-programmers, so I'm not interested in making them download things piecemeal --- for some, this is the first time they've ever installed non-Microsoft things (or maybe anything) on their laptops.
<rant>
Microsoft, Redhat/IBM, Oracle, now Anaconda... they're all trying to push us back to the heady days of the 1960's when computer installations were all closed shops. My school is already a minor supplicant of Microsoft. Was Crowdstrike a wake-up call? HAH!
</rant>
I have a copy of anaconda (which I haven't actually used, to be honest -- just thought it looked interesting.) Honestly, you can install any packages through pip. Anaconda looks like it COULD be worth every penny if you just want every possible AI, statistical, and numerical package already installed and kept up to date for you. It's a truly large collection of packages, and yet it's all stuff that looks quite useful (and that useful stuff's support packages).
(And I haven't used R so I can't comment on the R content of anaconda.)
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Enclose the common, flog off the real estate.
Never been much of a python user but years of trying to maintain users' collections of the latest and greatest python applications on Redhat EL7 which was stuck on python 2.7 gave me the impression that packaging wasn't python's forté.
Really didn't use Conda as the Redhat Software Collections (RHSCL) - developer toolsets - could usually be pressed into service and integrated with the existing environment modules.
I suspect that Anaconda think python is pivotal in developing AI/LLM and they wish to sell shovels in that gold rush. Whether python is or not I have no idea but once it's all pyrites those customers will evaporate and the other users will have moved on.
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The announcement 4 years ago _explicitly_ excluded academic and non-profit institutions from the paid requirements, including the 200 employee limit. If the quotes are accurate, it is a straight-up lie that this is just enforcement of a change announced long ago. It's enforcement of an _unannounced_ change made last year.
From the announcement 4 years ago:
> The new language states that use by individual hobbyists, students, universities, non-profit organizations, or businesses with less than 200 employees is allowed
Which continued to be true for at least 3 years. From the terms as of March 23, 2023:
> To avoid confusion, “commercial activities” are any use of the Repository which is NOT:
> - use solely by an individual using for personal, non-business purposes,
> - use by a student or employee of an educational institution in connection with educational activities,
> - use by an employee or volunteer on behalf of a non-profit institution in connection with the provision of charitable services,
> - use by a 501(c)(3) non-profit research institution in connection with non-commercial activities, such as research to address societal needs and global challenges, public policy development, or the advancement of science for the general good, where such work will not result in revenue to the institution, or use by entities in common control with each other with fewer than 200 employees in aggregate.
March snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/20230323110415/https://legal.anaconda.com/policies/en/?name=terms-of-service
This exception was removed by May, 2023: http://web.archive.org/web/20230523034206/https://legal.anaconda.com/policies/en/?name=terms-of-service
There are no blog posts or press releases that I can find announcing the mass revocation of licenses from academics and non-profits.
Wow! That would support also the fact that the previous CEO was quite clear about non-profits and academics not to worry about in 2022:
"If you’re a small business, if you’re a non-profit, if you’re an academic research facility, it doesn’t apply to you. If you’re a startup and you have 150 people and every single one of them is actively doing work in Jupyter notebooks, doing Dask things using open source, using our repo–it doesn’t matter,” he says.".
Why would he say something like that if it was be against the ToS in 2022?
https://www.datanami.com/2022/04/18/anacondas-commercial-fee-is-paying-off-ceo-says/
A year or so ago, Anaconda approached our Institute's director directly via email informing him that they thought we were in license violation for mirroring (we weren't doing so). By doing this they scared the horses and caused a poo hurricane which trickled down to legal and obviously triggered their risk averse nature. That combined with a lack of clarity over what exactly they were licensing to us didn't really help our perception of them as an unreliable partner.
This year they wanted to increase our licensing costs by 10x given the recent license change, but given how they have behaved we are disinclined to continue the agreement. Instead we are currently taking steps to thoroughly ban all things conda from our site. This will include the our GPU cluster and SRE we are making available to others. Given that we are a leading institute in our field I suspect they will find that whatever revenue they may make now is going to disappear in the medium to long term.
So long Anaconda, may be be stuck solving environment forever.
elReg> Anaconda is suing Intel
Better hurry before Intel becomes a non-profit and qualifies for "Free" tier.
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