# Psychtoolbox now offers priority support, community membership and more!

**URL:** <https://psychtoolbox.discourse.group/t/psychtoolbox-now-offers-priority-support-community-membership-and-more/3559>\
**Category:** Announcements\
**Tags:** news\
**Created:** [December 3, 2020, 5:11pm UTC](https://psychtoolbox.discourse.group/t/psychtoolbox-now-offers-priority-support-community-membership-and-more/3559 "2020-12-03T17:11:45Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![mariokleiner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/13edae/32.png) [@mariokleiner](https://psychtoolbox.discourse.group/u/mariokleiner)\
**Post date:** [December 3, 2020, 5:11pm UTC](https://psychtoolbox.discourse.group/t/psychtoolbox-now-offers-priority-support-community-membership-and-more/3559/1 "2020-12-03T17:11:45Z")

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[https://www.psychtoolbox.net](https://www.psychtoolbox.net)

As many of you know, for over 18 years Psychtoolbox for Matlab and the  
free GNU/Octave has been primarily developed by Mario Kleiner, with  
almost no support for his efforts. Over this time, not only  
Psychtoolbox’s popularity and functionality, but also the required  
workload, has greatly increased, requiring his full time commitment.

Given the urgency of this issue, some years ago an event was held at  
VSS to discuss how to improve the sustainability of Psychtoolbox,  
focusing especially on the financial situation. Additionally a user  
survey was conducted during the years 2016 to 2018, asking labs about  
their willingness to financially support Psychtoolbox development. Out  
of 1270 responses of individual labs, 417 labs (~33% of all responses)  
stated they would certainly contribute financially if invoices could  
be provided [1]. That was very encouraging and we have now made this  
possible!

Since 2018, Psychtoolbox and Mario Kleiner have found a new home in  
Medical Innovations Incubator GmbH, which supports early-stage  
companies in the area of life sciences with know-how and methods.  
Since then, Mario and the incubator have together developed a concept  
for commercial support and services which will allow Mario to continue  
Psychtoolbox development.

Here we would like to introduce the outcome of this work with our  
companion website, [https://www.psychtoolbox.net](https://www.psychtoolbox.net) , detailing the  
options available for labs, companies and individuals to support the  
Psychtoolbox project.

In particular, we want to point labs to the ability to purchase a  
yearly membership for paid priority support. At a modest price,  
this provides labs with fast expert advice and  
help for questions and problems related to Psychtoolbox and its  
surrounding ecosystem, in addition to supporting the future  
maintenance and development of Psychtoolbox and the software it  
depends upon.  
E.g., Mario also improves the open-source Linux operating system to  
make it even more suitable for experiments requiring high precision,  
performance, flexibility and robustness. He also develops workarounds  
for bugs in proprietary operating systems like Apple macOS and  
MS-Windows. All of this work additionally benefits other neuroscience  
toolkits, especially ones which use parts of Psychtoolbox as their  
underpinning, e.g., PsychoPy.

Additional options include contracting us for development and  
improvement of specific Psychtoolbox or Linux features which are vital  
for your experimental needs [2]. We also offer product integration  
partnerships for companies which manufacture and sell neuroscience  
products.

Lastly, for a small fee, individuals can become community members -  
essentially a small donation. You can also buy Psychtoolbox swag (from  
t-shirts, hoodies and mugs all the way to teddy bears) in the swag  
shop, where a fraction of the proceeds will go to support  
Psychtoolbox.

We hope that through [https://www.psychtoolbox.net](https://www.psychtoolbox.net) labs, companies and  
users can find the right support or partner program fitting to their  
individual needs, and can find a way to contribute to Psychtoolbox  
development and maintenance. As is the case with many open source  
projects, we depend on your support to keep the project viable and  
moving forward. We hope that we are now able to offer you viable and  
mutually beneficial ways of financially contributing to the project.

Please also contact us at [https://www.psychtoolbox.net](https://www.psychtoolbox.net) if you would  
like to discuss other options, or if you run into any problems with  
the purchase process.

As a recent example of the exciting new features added to  
Psychtoolbox, including High Dynamic Range support, that keep  
Psychtoolbox as the foremost option for demanding neuroscience and  
beyond, click this link to see what is new in the recent Psychtoolbox  
3.0.17 release:

> [@Psychtoolbox 3.0.17 Beta update “Dynamically High!” released](https://psychtoolbox.discourse.group/t/psychtoolbox-3-0-17-beta-update-dynamically-high-released/3489):
>
> Psychtoolbox 3.0.17 Beta update “Dynamically High!” was released at 2nd November 2020. As usual, the complete development history can be found in our GitHub repository. The release tag is “3.0.17.0”, with the full tree and commit logs under the URL: [https://github.com/Psychtoolbox-3/Psychtoolbox-3/tree/3.0.17.0](https://github.com/Psychtoolbox-3/Psychtoolbox-3/tree/3.0.17.0) If you choose to use Psychtoolbox with Matlab then, at time of release, the most well tested Matlab versions on Linux are now R2014b and R2019a. The most well tested Matlab version on…

Your continued support will allow continuous progress, as well as  
maintenance, to ensure your code keeps working on old and new hardware  
and operating systems, and for exciting new paradigms to become  
possible over the years to come.

Rest assured: Psychtoolbox itself will remain open source software.

Thank you for your time and support,  
The Psychtoolbox team

[1] Another 635 labs (~50%) responded that their support would depend  
on the specific payment or business model behind Psychtoolbox. If you  
are one of these labs and none of our current options are suitable for  
you, please get in touch with us at [https://www.psychtoolbox.net](https://www.psychtoolbox.net)

[2] A few examples of our happy contract work customers so far are  
PsychoPy for substantially improved audio, timing and response  
collection functionality; Denis Pelli for fixing severe issues with  
Apple macOS for visual stimulus timing and response collection; and  
the VESA industry consortium for High Dynamic Range display support  
(see [VESA Funds Development of New Video Compression Test Tool for High Dynamic Range Displays - VESA - Interface Standards for The Display Industry](https://vesa.org/featured-articles/vesa-funds-development-of-new-video-compression-test-tool-for-high-dynamic-range-displays/)  
for their press release).

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**Author:** ![mariokleiner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/13edae/32.png) [@mariokleiner](https://psychtoolbox.discourse.group/u/mariokleiner)\
**Post date:** [December 5, 2020, 1:21pm UTC](https://psychtoolbox.discourse.group/t/psychtoolbox-now-offers-priority-support-community-membership-and-more/3559/2 "2020-12-05T13:21:16Z")

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**Author:** ![mariokleiner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/13edae/32.png) [@mariokleiner](https://psychtoolbox.discourse.group/u/mariokleiner)\
**Post date:** [December 5, 2020, 1:24pm UTC](https://psychtoolbox.discourse.group/t/psychtoolbox-now-offers-priority-support-community-membership-and-more/3559/3 "2020-12-05T13:24:27Z")

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![mariokleiner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/13edae/32.png) [@mariokleiner](https://psychtoolbox.discourse.group/u/mariokleiner)\
**Post date:** [December 5, 2020, 1:24pm UTC](https://psychtoolbox.discourse.group/t/psychtoolbox-now-offers-priority-support-community-membership-and-more/3559/4 "2020-12-05T13:24:52Z")

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![mariokleiner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/13edae/32.png) [@mariokleiner](https://psychtoolbox.discourse.group/u/mariokleiner)\
**Post date:** [March 31, 2025, 6:16am UTC](https://psychtoolbox.discourse.group/t/psychtoolbox-now-offers-priority-support-community-membership-and-more/3559/5 "2025-03-31T06:16:09Z")

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