Mario – I’ve just finished some initial tests of 3.0.20.1 and was pleased with the results. And many thanks to all who made this one possible. Do you have a sense for when licensing info and costs will be available?
-Michael
The “when” is unfortunately an ever shifting point in time. I was pretty confident it would be May 2024, then October, then November, then December, then certainly 20th January. Now I’m fighting with a cold or something and in the more lucid moments, trying to learn the ropes of the online shop, and of integrating the shop with the license manager (PHP programming by trial and error, bloody beginner level). The product definitions etc. haven’t been written. And various other stuff.
My guess would be late January or early February, hopefully, maybe? It is not much stuff that needs to be done, but it is almost all stuff that is technically not my job, and that I’m mostly unqualified to do, and nobody else is really taking the time to do any work on the business side, and our lack of funding means we can’t outsource anything in exchange for money. So I bumble slowly into the general direction of the finish line 
.
Wrt. prices, nothing has been set in stone, and technically my boss as the official and legally responsible leader of the business side of the Psychtoolbox project would have to decide on them, so anything I’m stating here could change, but in practice he usually just mostly follows my lead.
I think we should price the initial “small lab” base license at something like around 200 Euros per year + applicable sales taxes for a license key that allows installing PTB on about 6 setups, ie. six unique combinations of operating system + physical machine. Our old user survey from 2016 - 2018 with over 1400 responses and the latter survey from 2022-2023 with only about 103 usable responses both suggest that a “typical lab” uses 6 installations on average plus/minus a few.
I also thought about maybe having individual licenses for installation on exactly one OS+machine setup for about 50 Euros + taxes.
And probably we would need another tier for slightly bigger labs with slightly higher prices, e.g., 10 or 12 machine licenses, with a slightly higer discount compared to the base license. And then see…
Answers the question I posed on another topic. This looks entirely reasonable.
I did wonder whether a department licence tier would also make sense, as it may be easier for administrators who are the true masters when it comes to purchases…
Your current price tiers make sense to me.
One question: lets say I have 10 machines but only have 6 active at any time, how will moving a licence from one device to another work? There are many possible license types, and some allow a floating license where others don’t: Implementing License Models | Cryptlex Documentation
Pricing is still not fixed. Currently I’m leaning towards something like 50 Euros for a single machine license, 250 Euros for a six machine license. Redoing the math, 200 Euros for six machines would have been a bit too much discount - we wouldn’t have headroom for a bit more discount for larger quantities.
I kind of don’t want to start too low in pricing / or more like too generous with discounts, as I want to avoid a situation where we paint ourselves into a corner where uptake would avoid bankruptcy in the short term but again leave us with insufficient funding for long term sustainability, or a fair salary and budget for a healthy way forward. I really don’t want the financial misery of just scraping by on life support to continue - 11 years of that is more than enough for me.
It’s a node-locked licensing model, not a floating model: A purchased license key allows activation on a specific amount of n machines, e.g., n=1,6,… A combination of operating-system type + physical machine counts as “one node activation”, as the fingerprinting and counting algorithm of Cryptlex counts two different operating systems on the same physical machine (ie. a dual-boot) as two different nodes - I guess the computed fingerprint is operating system specific.
You can reassign the available activations to different machines by deactivating a machine, and then use that “freed up” activation on a different machine by activating that machine. help PsychLicenseHandling has subfunctions to do that from within Matlab/Octave for a machine. There’s also the option of a online customer portal that allows to do these reassignments from a web browser. I haven’t seen that portal yet, as our current cheapest 50$/month Cryptlex service plan does not allow use of the portal, but I think we should probably upgrade to the 100$/month plan to enable that self-service portal from the beginning of sales. Right now we have 660 trial activations, and if those people stick with us, we’d have to upgrade anyway, as the limit of the base plan is 500 activations.
1 Like