add blog/2020-11-20-anaconda-tos.md

Co-authored-by: beckermr <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: cj-wright <[email protected]>

Author: 3 people

blog/2020-11-20-anaconda-tos.md

@@ -0,0 +1,50 @@
+---
+authors:
+  - core
+tags: [conda-forge]
+---
+
+# Package Distribution and the `anaconda.com` Terms of Service
+
+Various members of the community have raised questions publicly and
+privately about the implications of Anaconda's new Terms of Service
+(TOS) on `anaconda.com`. First of all, we understand your concerns. We
+would like to explain a bit how `conda-forge` works, how the TOS change
+affects us and `conda-forge` users, and what our plans as a community
+are for the future.
+
+<!--truncate-->
+
+What makes it non-surprising [that no other free conda package
+distribution services have appeared] is that, at the moment, any third
+party channel like `conda-forge` is free. The TOS change does not apply
+to `conda-forge`, nor to other channels hosted on anaconda.org; the TOS
+change in question applies only to the "defaults" channel and other
+software hosted on repo.anaconda.com.
+
+While having alternative hosting is in our plans, we cannot afford the
+costs. We are just a community of volunteers. We have experimented with
+uploading the `conda-forge` artifacts to GitHub and continue to do so
+(see `regro/releases`). We also have put those artifacts behind an
+experimental repodata server. One of our core devs (@wolfv) is working
+to setup `quetz` with `conda-forge` artifacts as well.
+
+It is very important to recognize that Anaconda Inc kindly donates use
+of their hosting and employee time to us, absorbing all of these costs.
+They host about 1.8 TB of our data and serve over 100 million downloads
+of artifacts from that data each month. This is a highly significant
+donation and `conda-forge` would not exist without it. Anaconda Inc
+employees also provide help with maintaining some of the most complex
+package recipes in conda-forge.
+
+Note that Anaconda Inc has also said that part of the revenue from the
+TOS change will be donated to OSS projects. (See this blog post:
+<https://www.anaconda.com/blog/sustaining-our-stewardship-of-the-open-source-data-science-community>).
+You should be aware that `conda-forge` is a part of NumFOCUS, and so it
+stands to benefit from the change in TOS, as do many other OSS projects.
+
+We absolutely welcome help from the community to move our efforts on
+building out more hosting infrastructure for `conda-forge` forward. This
+could be anything from spending time developing `quetz` to providing
+hosting/mirroring for our data. Please do get in contact with us if
+you'd like to help out!