[visionlist] Psychtoolbox now offers priority support, community membership and more!

Jonathan Peirce Jonathan.Peirce at nottingham.ac.uk
Wed Dec 2 16:17:38 -04 2020


Well done Diederick, Mario, and Medical Innovations Incubator GmbH, for finding a solution. Fingers crossed that people get on board with it the way they should.

Wishing you all the best with the new venture and hope it allows the whole team to keep up the wonderful work - it's super-valuable to the entire community.

Jon

--
Jon Peirce
Assoc Prof, University of Nottingham
Founder, Open Science Tools Ltd, creators of PsychoPy and Pavlovia.org


On 02/12/2020, 15:04, "visionlist on behalf of Diederick C. Niehorster" <visionlist-bounces at visionscience.com on behalf of dcnieho at gmail.com> wrote:

    Apologies for cross-posting.

    https://www.psychtoolbox.net

    Have you got some leftover funds in your lab's budget and wonder how
    to spend them before Christmas? Wonder no longer, we can help!

    As many of you know, for over 15 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 , 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 of 150
    Euros per year (+ VAT), 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 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 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:
    https://psychtoolbox.discourse.group/t/psychtoolbox-3-0-17-beta-update-dynamically-high-released/3489

    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 and
    will continue to be available for free.

    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

    [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 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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