Blog post author here – happy to take any questions. We're looking to unify the conda + PyPI ecosystems and build a really nice cross-platform, language independent package manager (which is called pixi).
We'll have some more conversations around this in the upcoming weeks I hope.
But we have a strong and true commitment to open source. A non-open-source package manager would definitely not work for our community!
Perhaps packages that are borderline irrelevant should not squat on prime name real estate. Plus cant rip ship as rip-py and still install as rip on the bet that nobody is actually going to be trying to use these tools simultaneously?
Who cares if every build script in the world breaks, progress waits for no one.
Conda-forge also produces packages for much more (nodejs, Qt, HDF5, C/C++ compilers, LLVM ...).
So we have access to a pretty big repository and a large community already :)