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Frequently Asked Questions

General

Licensing

What happened to the 30-day trial version of EPD?

With the release of EPD Free, we stopped distributing trial versions of EPD. EPD Free allows potential customers to try out our single-click cross-platform installers and begin working with essential libraries. This way, their toolset remains useful even if they choose not to upgrade. If you need a trial version of EPD Basic, please contact a sales representative. Back to top.

I'm an academic. How do I get EPD?

We are happy to make full version of EPD available to students and staff from degree-granting institutions. Using your academic email address, you may download it here. Back to top.

What's the difference between EPD and ETS?

The Enthought Python Distribution is a distribution of the Python programming language. EPD is made available through a subscription model and includes dozens of libraries out of the box. Many of these libraries are written and maintained by third parties (not Enthought), and distributed within EPD under their particular open source license terms.

The Enthought Tool Suite is a growing set of open source code made available under a liberal BSD license. Enthought has contributed heavily to the development of ETS, but there is also an active community of outside authorship and use. ETS is, and will remain, free. Its BSD license terms allow anyone to use the ETS code in any way they want. While ETS and all of its dependencies are included in EPD, ETS is also available separately in source or egg form. See code.enthought.com for details. Back to top.

EPD is big. How can I get a CD or DVD copy?

Drop us a line at info@enthought.com. We'll be glad to send media for a modest fee. Back to top.

I don't see library X included. How do you determine what is included? Do you take suggestions?

We've rarely seen a useful library we didn't like. We will consider any suggestion of libraries for inclusion into EPD. The main considerations are:

• How painful is it to build?
• Does it have a permissive license?
• How useful is it to our target community?
• Is the functionality already in EPD?

Notice that there's no mention of disk footprint—that may be a consideration in the future, but for now, we're treating disk space as an abundant resource. Back to top.

Can I contribute to EPD?

Of course. Developers are welcome to work on any projects included in EPD. In particular, we encourage contributions to ETS, our open-source tool suite. If you are not a developer, you can still help us out by asking questions you'd like to see in this FAQ, or even by submitting written documentation for inclusion in future distributions. Back to top.

Will EPD for Mac provide a "standard" (i.e. behaves like a Linux installation) version of Python in which I can install any other Python module?

It is basically a standard OS X version of Python with a bunch of extra packages. It doesn't quite behave like a Linux installation because Apple just has to be different. In particular, EPD, like the system's installation of Python and the official python.org binaries, provides a framework build. This is not a bad thing, by any means! You can install any other Python module you like. Overriding EPD packages shouldn't be any trickier than deleting the package from site-packages before installing your own. Back to top.

There seems to be a bug in <package-name-here>. When will you fix it?

We are constantly refining and improving EPD. If you find a bug, we want to hear about it. Enthought provides different levels of support for EPD. Basic and Silver-level support only provides support for installing, updating, and uninstalling EPD. Gold-level support, however, does allow bug-fix, best-practices, and "how-do-I" support. See Gold Support for EPD for details. Back to top.

How do I update EPD?

See How to Update EPD for details. Back to top.

What version of EPD should I choose for OSX?

EPD for OS X comes in two versions, one for 32-bits and one for 64-bits, and it is possible to have both installed on the same Mac computer. We no longer develop Universal builds, however EPD subscribers have access to OSX 10.4 Intel/PPC-compatible EPD in the repository. Academic users may also download this version at no cost.

The 32-bits build is fully-featured and comes with all of the EPD packages available on OSX. The 64-bits build has fewer packages: Notably, wxPython is not present because it uses the deprecated Carbon UI API that Apple will not port to 64-bits. However, Tk works, and matplotlib at least can use the Tk backend just fine. Traits UI and Mayavi don't, however. The jury is still out on PyQt. We haven't built it for 64-bits, yet, but it may work.

If you choose the 32-bit EPD and are going to be building extension modules that link against externally-built libraries, you should just be aware that OS X's standard compile flags in Snow Leopard usually only build the 64-bit version. So just be careful to build those external C libraries with the -arch i386 flag so they can be linked with your 32-bit extension modules. Back to top.

Licensing

Can you give me a quick overview of the license terms?

Absolutely, but we do encourage you to refer to the actual license as the final word. EPD is licensed on a honor-system and per-user basis.  Subscribers may install as many copies of EPD as desired on any machine in any location for their own use. These installations are not to be used by others.  Back to top.

Why do you license EPD this way?

The real intent of the license is promote the use of Python in the enterprise. Many firms need a pre-bundled Python platform that works the same across multiple operating system and hardware configurations. EPD provides that platform with powerful Python enhancements that increase productivity. Educational use within a degree-granting institution is, and will remain, free. We've had numerous requests for Enthought to be a supporting entity behind a distribution that contains many of the interesting libraries that the EPD holds. Charging for commercial (and governmental) use of the software allows us to do this as well as continue to support SciPy and ETS. Back to top.

I work for a large company. Can I get a site license?

Certainly. Our Gold and Platinum subscriptions provide many enterprise-level benefits including use of EPD for an unlimited number of users in your organization. The price is based on the size of the company and how many users you expect. Back to top.

What if Enthought inadvertently bundles something into EPD that is not open source or that has more restrictive license terms than the EPD license?

For the most part, we only include packages that have had some amount of history and popularity with the community. In that way, we use the community as a kind of filter; sneaky license terms will be brought into the light of day fairly quickly. There are some packages in EPD that have optional proprietary components with commercial licenses; we make sure that we build those packages without the proprietary components.

There are a few packages we include that are not open source, but we ensure that by following the terms of the EPD license, you would automatically comply with the terms of the closed source license. For example, MKL is not open source, but the developer license that we purchased from Intel gives us the right to redistribute the MKL as part of our offering. As long as you use EPD according to the license that we granted you, you are using the MKL under the terms of the redistribution license. Back to top.

Can I distribute (pieces) of EPD with my application or embed EPD into my device (oscilloscope, scientific instrument, phone, etc.)?

Definitely. We work out customized and affordable payment plans for OEM re-distribution of EPD. Please contact us and we will be happy to work something out with you. Back to top.

Want details on the EPD development timeline?
See our EPD changelog.