Hi Dave,

>Is there an alternative way to get the new version of curl without using conda?

No. All rocket ported tools support only conda installation (except for conda itself via the z/OS Miniconda installer).  There was a transition period for six months after we announced the move to conda but that is now past.

However, once you have z/OS Miniconda set up on your system, customers with a support contract can set up a local file channel on premise and populate it with the z/OS open source ports from which your internal consumers can download and install without going to the internet.
 

That said, it is possible to manually download a package from the public conda channel hosted at anaconda.org, transfer it to z/OS and install using command 'conda install <package.tar.bz2>'. However, it is not a supported workflow, dependencies won't be installed this way, and some functionality might be missing.