On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 8:43 AM, Cygler, Miroslaw <miroslaw.cyg...@usask.ca>wrote:
> I have inquired at Schrodinger about the licensing for PyMol. I was > surprised by their answer. The access to PyMol is only through a yearly > licence. They do not offer the option of purchasing the software and using > the obtained version without time limitation. This policy is very different > from many other software packages, which one can use without continuing > licensing fees and additional fees are only when an upgrade is needed. At > least I believe that Office, EndNote, Photoshop and others are distributed > this way. > I also remember very vividly the Warren’s reason for developing PyMol, and > that was the free access to the source code. He later implemented fees for > downloading binary code specific for one’s operating system but there were > no time restrictions on its use. > As far as I recollect, Schrodinger took over PyMol distribution and > development promising to continue in the same spirit. Please correct me > if I am wrong. > I find the constant yearly licensing policy disturbing and will be looking > for alternatives. I would like to hear if you have had the same experience > and what you think about the Schrodinger policy. > This is no different than the licenses that for-profit companies are required to purchase for most crystallography software. In fact, it's actually considerably more liberal than most software*, because as Jim notes you can still obtain (and redistribute) most of the source code for free. From what I can tell Schrodinger has continued to make improvements to the open-source core; some of the newer features (and the native Mac GUI) are proprietary, but that was true ten years ago. -Nat (* although I believe ccp4mg is truly open-source like Coot, and unlike CCP4 etc. which still require a license for commercial use. Or am I misinformed?)
