![]() ![]() Some accuse Anaconda of using bait-and-switch techniques, of trying to monetize the hard work of other open source developers. Not everybody is happy with the change to the terms of service. We just want all of those guys to actually shift over to using our commercial repository.” Sometimes they have deployments go wrong and they slam and DOS our repositories. They’re hitting our repositories all the time. “What it really affects is the really giant big companies–the massive banks, the massive industrial companies,” he continues. 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. “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. That left a large number of users unaffected, Wang says. ![]() Heavy commercial use was defined as a commercial entity with 200 or more users using the software on a regular basis. In October 2020, the company decided to add some teeth to its terms of service. Our lawyer will tell you why it’s unenforceable.’” “Legal is like ‘We don’t have to pay, right?’ ‘Nope?’” came the response from the Anaconda representative. This is great,’” Wang says.īut when the sales conversations went up the ladder to the IT managers and eventually the legal team, things got a little less rosy. “We call them, and the data scientists say ‘Oh yeah, of course, we love your stuff. A few companies paid what Anaconda asked for, but most didn’t.Īnaconda called some of the heavy users of the free and open source software, and tried a slightly more direct approach. The company decided to rely on the honor system because it was sensitive to its community and didn’t want to upset it, Wang says. However, Anaconda did something interesting with that April 2020 change: It didn’t specify what “heavy commercial use” actually meant. The Anaconda Distribution contains about 250 open s ource packages, while the Anaconda Repository has access to about 8,000 more We need to make a little bit of money back on it so we can support it.” “We said, look, we’re at a point now where the adoption of Python is so massive, the cost of supporting package builds and integration of all these things–it actually is significant,” Wang says. The old business model changed in April 2020, when Anaconda tweaked its terms of service to ask “heavy commercial users” to pay $15 per user per month for access to the package. However, thanks to skyrocketing adoption of Python–not to mention the additional costs of certifying Anaconda on new hardware platforms such as Arm and GPUs and addressing the demands of cloud platforms–the financial balance became untenable, according to Wang, a 2020 Datanami Person to Watch. The Austin, Texas company addresses this challenge with its Conda package manager, as well as through the efforts of dozens of Anaconda engineers and upstream volunteers at the open source projects themselves.įor years, Anaconda’s business model relied on profits from its commercial data science platform business to help sustain the work it did to maintain the free and open source Anaconda Distribution. Getting all of these open source packages to play nicely together is not an easy task, especially as the packages and their underlying dependencies change over time. Millions of users around the world have downloaded and used the Anaconda Distribution, which contains hundreds of individual Python tools, such as NumPy, Pandas, SciPy, and more (R is also included in the distro, but Anaconda is closely associated with Python). Since 2012, Anaconda has been providing one of the most popular Python packages in the data science community popular. While it upset some users, the move is paying off, Anaconda CEO Peter Wang tells Datanami. The change, it said, was necessary to offset the costs of maintaining a large and increasingly complex body of open source software. ![]() Anaconda created a stir over a year ago when it began charging large commercial users a fee for access to its popular collection of Python tools. ![]()
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