conda
Warn of potential incurred costs with non-free channels
Checklist
- [X] I added a descriptive title
- [X] I searched open reports and couldn't find a duplicate
What happened?
Several organizations have discontinued using the conda ecosystem because they were utilizing the Miniconda or Anaconda installer as indicated in the documetation, found themselves using the Anaconda channels which were the defaults, and were asked for a large amounts of money.
I think that it would be beneficial to avoid surprises. I propose addressing this issue:
- first by including language in the documentation and README indicating that the use of certain channels (and therefore the Miniconda/Anaconda distribution) may incur costs.
- by adding warnings in the Conda codebase when using non-free channels. Initially, these warnings could be triggered on channel URLs at first. At a later stage, warnings could be enabled based on channel metadata (which could also include relevant information such as potential terms of services).
Additional Context
No response
@SylvainCorlay Just wanted to confirm that I've seen this and that these are really two different issues, we've separated documentation updates from code work usually, since it helps parallelize the work and asking for help from technical writers. I did add this ticket to the epic #14249 to make sure we're keeping track of the work.
The first part you mentioned above about the documentation is at least related, possibly a duplicate of https://github.com/conda/conda/issues/14225 (I've added the blurb to that ticket). I concur, this is worth spelling out in the conda project docs, but also on the docs.conda.io landing page as well, which is maintained in https://github.com/conda/conda-docs.
The second part is something that @ericdill and I discussed as well and that is worth doing, also in the iterative format you suggest, with the eventual goal of having a community-defined format for channel metadata that includes information about ToS etc (probably not channeldata.json), it was also discussed in the 2024-09-11 conda community sync.
I've worked on the docs a little FWIW https://github.com/conda/conda/pull/14268
There is more coming related to this soon. I've marked this for the March release cycle since that's probably the timeframe for that upcoming release.
@jezdez and @kenodegard,
What items are left to be completed with this issue? Is the remaining task to define a standard for including ToS information when creating a channel?
conda 25.9.0 will no longer inject the defaults into the channel list, other plugins have addressed notifying the user of potential incurred costs with non-free channels
