[chemfp] new chemfp 3.x license options

[Andrew Dalke]

Hi all,

  I've decided to make the chemfp 3.x series also available under a proprietary license. It is still available under the MIT license for those who wish to pay full price for it. The new options are cheaper, though also more restrictive in what you can do with it.

This change only affects the commercial 3.x series. The chemfp 1.x series is still available for no cost, under the MIT license.

Chemfp 3 has many new features over chemfp 1, including a binary format for fast loading, new API for web development, support for more than 4GB of fingerprint data, higher search performance, sublinear Tversky search, and support for both Python 2.7 and Python 3.5+.

The new license options are:

 1) a demo/evaluation version as a pre-compiled "manylinux" distribution for Linux-based OSes

This version is available at no cost, using a time-locked license key.

If a valid license key isn't found, then arena creation and FPS search are disabled. Other features, like FPS generation and the high-level toolkit fingerprint API, are still available, but chemfp will print a message to stderr on import.

Let me know if you are interested in testing out the new distribution. Readers of this list who email now to help with this testing will, at the end, get a 1 year license key at no charge, for non-commmercial research use.

  2) Academic licensing

For EUR 1,000 (about USD 1,200), your group/campus gets the source code under a permanent license for teaching, doing research, and developing public web servers/services. The source code may not be distributed beyond your campus.

As an exception, it may be used on remote compute centers like Amazon EC2, and on laptops and storage media which are primarily associated with your campus.

This option includes limited support.

  3) Single site corporate license

For EUR 6,000 (about USD 7,000), your company gets the source code under a permanent license for internal use at a single, geographically located site.

A similar exception for remote use holds for this license, and the definition of "site" is flexible.

  4) World-wide corporate license

For EUR 10,000 (about USD 12,000) your company gets the source code under a permanent license for internal use at any of its sites around the world.

  5) Open source license

For EUR 30,000 you may purchase chemfp under the MIT open source license. This is a continuation of the existing license model.

Options 3-5 include one year of support including free updates for a year and an option to renew support at a reduced rate.

If you want chemfp for some other purpose, let me know, and we'll see if it's possible to come to an agreement.


You might be wondering why I added new licensing options.

I wanted to see if I could develop chemfp as commercial free/open-source software, where people paid for the advanced features of the commercial version, and the no-cost version had fewer features.

In practice, this limited chemfp distribution to pharmaceutical companies - organizations who could pay the most and were the least likely to redistribute the software. From a business sense, the riskiest users are academics, who can't pay much but where it's more likely that a graduate student will see that chemfp is under the MIT license and put it on github, where others can get access to it.

There were some other issues that came up as well, like where an organization only wanted a few features of chemfp, didn't want to pay full price, but might use more of it in the future, and pay more when they need those features. I didn't design chemfp in components to solve that technically, so on my side it was all-or-nothing. An alternative with a proprietary license is to restrict feature use contractually.




				Andrew
				dalke at dalkescientific.com