I just want to note multiple things regarding that.

I very much agree that this data is extremely valuable, and losing it would be a terrible blow for research communities and even understanding our own ecosystems.

That’s why I believe, no matter what happens: new store paths should be shipped to something that does not cost egress fees if possible, more on that later.

Onto the next thing:

The $32K migration fee, is, I assume, the egress thingie that AWS charge everyone for trying to quit their platform.

Multiple things to unpack:

(1) Have we reached out to AWS regarding this matter while pleading our case as a non-trivial open source project (which they benefited from, I’m certain, indirectly)?
(2) Have we reached out to a financial cloud experts such as https://www.duckbillgroup.com/ which are very active on social medias and I usually believe nice to open source projects for help?

(3) Egress fees are a known tactic to vendor lock-in people into a platform:

AWS are a very well-known offender on that.
Thankfully, R2 Object Storage has ZERO egress fee for now.
I think this situation is highly changing with respect to regulations:
https://twitter.com/platombe/status/1656634228979781633 (French tweet on a law attacking the egress fees situation from the cloud providers by the French government).
Sécuriser et réguler l’espace numérique (art. 7. §. 6)

« III. – Il est interdit à tout fournisseur de services d’informatique en nuage de facturer, dans le cadre des contrats qu’il conclut avec une personne exerçant des activités de production, de distribution ou de services, des frais au titre du transfert de données vers les infrastructures de cette personne ou vers celles mises à disposition, directement ou indirectement, par un autre fournisseur, à l’exception des frais de migration liés au changement de fournisseur.

“III. – It is prohibited for any provider of cloud computing services to charge, within the