New T&C: Is PyPI moving towards a paid subscription model and/or abandoning package neutrality?

[EWDurbin (Ee Durbin)]

Briefly to maybe keep this from spiraling from FUD to chaos over the weekend.

Bottom line: these Terms of Service are fundamentally to formalize protections for maintainers, PyPI volunteers, and the PSF as we finally begin moving forward with PyPI Organizations for paid corporate users. Embarrassingly, nearly two entire years since we hoped to start.

@fkiraly

is PSF moving pypi to a paid subscription model?

Yes. For corporate usage, (edit: who choose to opt in to the paid features) in order to provide Organization features which will continue be provided to Community projects at no cost, forever. We also intend to add additional paid features that will help offset sustainability concerns such as bandwidth and staffing costs to support PyPI.

@fkiraly

Is PSF looking to abolish package neutrality on pypi?

No.

@fkiraly

Taken together, the terms of services could be seen as indicating a move towards a commercial, competitive package hosting model. It is of course hard to predict how far this move will go, but the changes may be seen as clearly indicative of this direction.

The summary is here: Introducing our new Terms of Service - The Python Package Index Blog.

We are adopting this TOS to formalize the relationship and protections for maintainers, the pypi admins, and PSF in order to move forward with paid Organization accounts for corporate users.