Conda licensing for enterprise use?

JupyterHub
,
2

disclaimer: I am a former Anaconda, Inc. employee, and active contributor to conda-forge and some related open source projects

The full-fat Anaconda Distribution, its smaller sibling miniconda, and their defaults repositories on https://repo.anaconda.com/ are indeed no longer trivially free-as-in-beer for all uses, and the full distribution includes not-free-as-in-speech packages.

conda, however, is a separate, open source project with a dedicated governance model. While a number of current and former Anaconda, Inc. employees are a part of said group, it is also enjoys representation by a number of other stakeholders, and much like Jupyter, has an open process for most major changes, and a publicly-searchable forum just like this one.

To my knowledge, all official Jupyter projects get (and encourage getting) their conda-compatible packages from https://anaconda.org/conda-forge, bandwidth and labor for which is donated by Anaconda, Inc. conda-forge is the free-as-in-beer and -speech, community-driven upstream of the Anaconda Distribution, analogous to the relationship between Fedora and RedHat Enterprise Linux.

The relationship between conda-forge and Anaconda, Inc.'s terms of service is described more fully on the conda-forge blog.

Some rough, totally unofficial guidance:

If an organization has control of its own environment, it can:

  • start with a baseline such as miniforge (or its sibling mambaforge, or the even-smaller micromamba),
    • no packages will be pulled from anaconda.com without explicit configuration to do so
  • use mamba or micromamba instead of conda
    • they are generally faster
  • try to avoid sudo (cond|mamb)a anything
    • a better play is to make an environment as an unprivileged user, then chown it, if need be
  • fully specify important environments with environment.yml
    • capturing the full channel information
      • including the explicit nodefaults channel
  • mature these into fully-reproducible lockfiles with e.g. conda-lock
  • as an upstanding member of the community, try to make use of caching/proxies to reduce the load on anaconda.org, e.g. in CI, by sharing caches, etc.
    • full-on mirroring (even of entirely free packages) is not recommended
      • and would likely result in IP banning

If an organization must use or re-distribute the Anaconda Distribution or miniconda for some reason, then it must enter into a support and licensing relationship with Anaconda, Inc.

4 Likes