No mirrors?

Posted Oct 2, 2024 17:12 UTC (Wed) by Kalenx (subscriber, #120295)
In reply to: No mirrors? by khim
Parent article: The WordPress mess

Legal? As I already said, absolutely.
Reasonable? No sure I agree (IOW: I strongly disagree)

No one is obliged to keep up a Python package index. The Python Software Foundation does it because, presumably, it helps them fulfilling their own stated mission: "We are devoted to creating the conditions for Python and the Python community to grow and thrive."

If they start cutting off random people, including end users who did nothing wrong (other than choosing the "wrong" cloud provider), they are not, IMHO, "creating the conditions for the Python community to grow and thrive".

> If it were found that Azure users actually overload PyPI service and Microsoft does nothing to compensate that and this affects non-Azure users… then it would have been the right thing to do.

That would be the nuclear thing to do; not sure it makes it "right". Just as an example, throttling could also be an option. But anyway, we are going off topic, since this is clearly _not_ what happened in the Wordpress/WP engine case. This "resource usage" was not mention until after the fact...

No mirrors?

Posted Oct 2, 2024 18:31 UTC (Wed) by edgewood (subscriber, #1123) [Link]

I agree that it would be legal (unless there's already a contract) but unreasonable for PSF to cut off Azure in this hypothetical situation. If there was an excessive bandwidth usage, throttling or a warning that they could be cut off in the near future would be reasonable.

However, unlike in the hypothetical, WP Engine sent a cease and desist/preserve documents letter the day before the cutoff. I think that makes the cutoff more reasonable: if you're freeloading, maybe you should take some steps to stop relying on those free services before you go making legal threats.

No mirrors?

Posted Oct 3, 2024 12:24 UTC (Thu) by aragilar (subscriber, #122569) [Link]

I can't comment on how you would cache wordpress.org, but there are numerous tools which provide caching/mirroring of PyPI (for various use-cases, requirements and scales). If Azure (or more likely one of their customers) became abusive of the service (as someone did for the XMLRPC service), I don't see PyPI wouldn't and shouldn't as a last resort block Azure (as happened with the XMLRPC service). I would expect Azure to be reasonable and provide a cache/mirror and/or deal with abusive customer, but it would appear in the wordpress case reasonableness has gone out the window.