Interesting. It's hard to be sure from the vague notice, but it appears that the request is inappropriate. The only thing they state that could potentially apply to SO would be copyright violation, but they don't point to any actual instances of SO violating copyright. Copyright does not prevent people from asking and answering questions about a copyrighted thing.
Even if it did, I don't see how they could imagine that would apply retroactively, even with the "confusion" or whatever. "Please take down a piece of your property and of internet history about our product... because it reminds people of when it used to have a more permissive license and that's inconvenient to us as the people who want to restrict it."
I don't see any reason to believe this was requested by the Anaconda developers. For example, it refers to the Anaconda developers in the third person: "For example adding a footnote in a 2014 answer to state Anaconda has started restricting commercial usage is insufficient and misleading, as they have restricted nearly all usage later."
This seems more likely to have been written by some third party who'd annoyed about the license change.
I think it’s worthwhile to point out that the HN and SO OPs appear to be the same person, and that both accounts are not only old, but also have a fairly high status (fake internet points wise).
It is not clear who they represent, if any concerned party. At this time, the SO post has been taken down, and it appears SO posts with the related tags (anaconda, etc.) are still up.
It seems a tad strange for the user to repost their otherwise seemingly-unnoticed SO post to HN, so my only conclusion is that perhaps they were trying to have it gain attention for some reason?
As other commenters alluded to, this all seems a bit odd.
Why would StackOverflow need to delete mentions of trademarked or closed-source software? SO doesn't need to delete mentions of Windows, though their license terms have changed to require MS login, for example.
I am not an employee of Anaconda. I don't know anything else about their ongoing actions given terms that apply to commercial entities FWIU.
One should not legally threaten third parties with false authority about copyright, trademark, wordmark or the like.
If you do not want to pay Anaconda for their package manager and package repos of mostly open source code, you can use conda-forge with micromamba or conda or mamba or pixi, which are all BSD licensed.
FWIW, the conda-forge repos are also hosted by Anaconda at Anaconda's expense.
