I thought you didn't need an account to download from HF anymore. You can just do git lfs pull, at least for the stuff I've downloaded.
Personally I'm concerned about how model hosting has been concentrated in one company, and was previously very unhappy that they required accounts, but I think that's past. Let me know if it's still the case for some things.
When I go to https://huggingface.co/bigcode/starcoder it says "You need to agree to share your contact informations to access this model" and "[Log in] or [Sign Up] to review the conditions and access this model content."
Yeah you're right, that's super lame. It used to be like that with stable diffusion but they took the HF login requirement off at some point.
It's enough of a deal breaker for me to not bother using the model. Especially when it's developed by a company that (I assume) wants to harvest your contact info - unless there's some other explanation for the login requirement.
(I tried git lfs clone and got asked for hf login credentials)
But only to sue you when you are doing nasty things, that are against the license and they get wind about it. Regardless of that it doesn't work to backward-identify you, it was necessary to the legal aspect of their side of the license to have restricted access. Else this licence simply wouldn't work.
