As in title, my company is seeing a huge uptick in abusive messages from Anaconda.com seeking licensing revenue.
They’re hitting many people across the org with legal threats - many with zero control of whether a person uses conda or not. I don’t use it in my job at all, and neither do my teammates.
FWIW - we’re a small-ish growing startup that just recently crossed the 200 employee line. Our product is a database often used for AI and there are many packages within the Anaconda ecosystem that are owned by us, not them. So I don’t know why they’d be hounding us for licensing since the primary reason we’d use conda is to contribute to conda - not consume it.
It’s starting the conversation of needing to drop conda support for future releases. If they’re going to be this utterly vile, then why would we spend the effort packaging for them?
It’s gotten so bad that I’ve made FTC complaints over this. I’m tired of the near daily threats for something I have zero control over.
If anyone else is experiencing this, I highly recommend reporting the abusive comms to the FTC here - https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/ - also forward the emails to your HR/Legal team so they know to contact the state AG.
While I’m sure it was inevitable, especially in today’s climate, it saddens me to see Anaconda (and conda by extension I presume) go down like this. When they first came out it was such a breath of fresh air in the Python ecosystem.
I’m not sure in the details, but what’s the point in relying at all on any of their infrastructure? Is any of it independent enough?
The real kicker is that I’m fairly sure we aren’t really using them at any real scale - if we do it’s to demo our product within the context of AI development. So if anything, they get a lot of free press when we do that. If they’re gonna throw a fit over it, I’m sure we can work with some other “AI” company (that’s what they bill themselves as) that wants the free marketing. Heck, I can’t imagine the anaconda ecosystem working out if they keep threatening the developers that enrich that ecosystem.
Oh I get you, and it’s an insight into the priorities and operation of the company. They’re clearly worried about snaring all of the “free loaders” as they move to a more extractive business model. And so there’s probably a bunch of people with licence quotas hounding anyone they can.
Conda itself is outside of Anaconda, Inc’s control.
What about the package repos and conda forge? Apologies, it’s been a while since I paid attention to them (and Python packaging too). Does conda work well just against PyPI?