A Letter to Our Community from Peter Wang, Co-Founder of Anaconda

Dear Anaconda Community,

I want to address you directly regarding the changes and growth Anaconda has experienced and the updated Terms of Service (ToS) changes we’re implementing. But first, I owe you – our valued community members – an acknowledgment.

Last year, eager to continue iterating on our offerings and keep up with our growing user base, we rolled out not only updates to our ToS but also operational changes to the way we enforce them. We know this took many by surprise, particularly our academic and research users. The confusion, frustration, and disappointment this caused within our community is something we regret. We should have done better. 

Our intent with these ToS updates was to ensure that we can continue offering great benefits to our community for years to come. Our investments in open source innovation help power research institutions and academics worldwide. These investments have been, and will continue to be, financially sponsored by Anaconda. They are not free, but they are important. These investments are core to Anaconda’s mission. And to continue these investments and Anaconda’s contributions to innovation across the broader Python community, particularly in the age of AI, we have to make sure that Anaconda’s proprietary intellectual property is not being abused by for-profit enterprises.  

We’ve reflected on the past experience of our prior rollout of our ToS updates and have spent considerable time listening to your feedback, meeting with academic and research groups, reflecting on our approach, and rethinking how we structure and communicate our terms. The revised ToS we’re announcing today represent not just tweaks to legal language, but a reimagining of our user relationship to ensure that it is one based on clarity, transparency, and a deeper understanding of the diverse needs of our community.

What We’ve Changed

We’ve completely rewritten our ToS from the ground up with several guiding principles in mind:

• Plain language that real people can understand. Legal documents shouldn’t require a law degree. Our new terms use straightforward language and include plain-English summaries of key sections.
• Crystal clarity on who can use Anaconda for free. This includes:
  • Individuals using Anaconda for personal, non-commercial purposes
  • Eligible Academic Institutions and their users (now with a clear definition in our Academic Policy)
  • Eligible Non-Profit and Research Organizations and their users (as defined in our Non-Profit and Research Policy)
  • For-profit organizations with 200 or fewer workers
• Modular structure that shows exactly which terms apply to which products. We’ve created separate terms for different offerings and made it clear when certain products do not fall under our paid offering requirements.
• Redefined “Users”. To support the growing use of agentic and non-human systems, we’ve adjusted our definition of User to ensure we can support the changing landscape of how our community uses our products and services. We’ve also improved the user experience, by making it clear that “identified users” may use Anaconda across multiple machines under a single license.
• Clarified Special Use Case Pricing. We recognize that some of our institutional users have technical use cases beyond individual users. The use case categories of “scaled enterprise deployment” and “mirroring” are only allowed with special licensing and pricing. 

Strengthening Our Commitment to Academia and Research

Anaconda’s roots run deep in the research community. From the beginning, we built tools to support scientists, researchers, and students who were underserved by commercial software vendors. These users couldn’t get the IT support they needed to answer their questions in their specific domains or roles. We’ve always wanted to radically empower everyone to have cutting-edge tools for understanding the world through quantitative reasoning.

We’re launching a new initiative offering free access to the premium features included in our Starter Plan for eligible academic users, as part of our Anaconda for Education program. If you’re actively enrolled or employed at an accredited academic institution with a verified academic email address, you’re eligible to join with a free account that includes:

• Cloud Notebooks with 10GB of storage and daily compute time
• Comprehensive Learning Resources, such as our full on-demand course catalog, monthly live training, and Anaconda Certified courses

Building a Sustainable Future, Together

Anaconda exists at the intersection of open source and enterprise. At our core, we’re committed to making curated, trustworthy, and high-performance open source accessible to all. An important part of that mission is bridging innovation from open source communities into commercial environments, with their more stringent enterprise requirements.

Our business model is built on the principle that large organizations benefiting commercially from our tools should contribute financially to their development and maintenance. This model has enabled us to invest tens of millions of dollars in open source innovation over the last decade.

When large enterprises pay their fair share and respect the intellectual property rights of others, we can continue to support critical projects that tens of millions of Python users depend on daily. Just a taste of some of the critical open source investments that Anaconda makes:

• conda and conda-forge – maintaining over 27,000 packages that serve as the backbone of the Python scientific ecosystem
• BeeWare – revolutionizing Python’s reach by enabling cross-platform development across desktop, mobile, and web
• PyScript – bringing Python directly to browsers without server-side dependencies
• Numba and SPy – transforming Python into a high-performance computing powerhouse
• fsspec and Intake – providing universal access to data across different storage systems and formats
• HoloViz – democratizing data visualization with tools like Panel and Lumen AI
• Jupyter – advancing the primary workspace where AI innovations begin

By maintaining this balance between commercial sustainability and open source commitment, we can keep Anaconda free for individuals, academic institutions, non-profits, and smaller companies while continuing to invest in the core infrastructure that benefits the entire Python ecosystem. Read more about how Anaconda supports open source projects here.

Looking Forward

I’ve always believed that the most valuable currency in open source is trust, and I know that  we may have damaged some of that trust with our previous approach to ToS changes. Rebuilding it will take time, transparency, and consistent action – all of which we are committed to.

Today’s announcement is just one step in that journey. Our focus is on being loyal stewards of the open source ecosystem, thoughtful partners to academia and research, and transparent in how we communicate changes that affect our community. You have my personal commitment. I could not be more energized by the direction Anaconda is headed in. 

Our updated Terms of Service take effect on July 15, 2025. I encourage you to review them at anaconda.com/legal/terms/terms-of-service and to reach out to our team with any questions or concerns.

Anaconda exists to empower people with open data science. That mission starts with all of you, and we’re deeply grateful for your continued support, feedback, and participation in this community.

Sincerely,

Peter Wang, Co-Founder, Anaconda