Restricted Usage of Anaconda

The company Anaconda provides very convenient software development environments and libraries for Python and R, especially for beginners. Due to their many years of free availability for research and educational institutions, they are also very popular in training and in the discussion on StackOverflow.

In a clarification of the terms of use amended in 2020, Anaconda also designates research institutions with more than 200 employees as commercial users, for which corresponding usage fees apply. These fees are also due if employees of the institutions access Anaconda’s software directories. It is known from several institutions that this is actually being pursued by Anaconda.

As a consequence, some Helmholtz centers (e.g. HZDR) have decided to prohibit use and block access to the software directories, including access restriction to all software obtained directly from Anaconda, and in particular the standard channels in the still freely available conda command line environment.

However, the use of conda-forge (without the default channels) is still possible.

Recommended Alternatives

The following alternatives are available for the components offered by Anaconda:

• mamba instead of conda
• Miniforge instead of conda-forge
• Poetry project and package management solution for Python
• Rye Python packaging and dependency management
• pip as Python package manager
• venv for managing virtual Python environments
• Spyder can also be installed directly.
• Under Windows, WinPython is also an alternative complete Python environment.

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