Annual licensing for Mathematica

A new arrangement for licensing Mathematica is available for the University of Sydney.

The information below was supplied in November 1999 by John Brookes of Analytica International in Western Australia. If you have questions, please email John at john@analytica.com.au.

Annual fee

The way which Mathematica is licensed has changed recently, offering better and more flexible deals to universities who want to use many copies of Mathematica.

Firstly, you can pay an annual fee to use Mathematica, with no obligation of a 3 or 5 year period. During the year you pay for, you get Mathematica upgrades sent to you automatically (major Mathematica upgrades are released about every 2-3 years, with minor upgrades every 12 months or so). At the end of the year, you can reassess your Mathematica needs, and pay the appropriate annual fee for the following year.

You can buy extra licences during the year at pro-rata prices (on a quarterly basis). So if you add a PC floating user after (say) 6 months, it is half the initial price.

Licence manager

Secondly, Wolfram Research have released a Mathematica License Manager, which controls the number of copies of Mathematica running on machines on your network. This means that you can have Mathematica installed on 100 machines, but restricted to only run on (say) 20 at any one time, and this is controlled by the license manager. The license manager is cross platform, so the 20 machines running Mathematica could be a mixture of Windows PCs, Macs and Linux PCs. Mathematica licenses fixed to a single machine are still available, for those users who need to be sure they always have access to Mathematica.

You can have separate license servers for individual departments, but you have to pay for the license server as well, so it pushes up the price a bit if a department only wants one or two users. License managers and floating users can be on Unix boxes, for very nearly the same price as PCs.

Disadvantages

The downsides to the annual fee scheme are that:

Pricing

Note that pricing depends on the total volume of a purchase across the University: this is not yet clear.

Annual fees for a total of 50 users are:

License Manager $105
Floating User (PC/Mac/Linux only) $165 ea
Floating User (any platform) $185 ea
Single Machine/Single User License (PC/Mac/Linux) $185
Single Machine/Single User License (Unix) $415

Annual fees for a total of 20 users are:

License Manager $160
Floating User (PC/Mac/Linux only) $255 ea
Floating User (any platform) $285 ea
Single Machine/Single User License (PC/Mac/Linux) $285
Single Machine/Single User License (Unix) $635

The above user licences include both the kernel and the Front End. Licences for a Front End alone are also available, at (assuming 20-49 total licences) $90 each for PC/Mac/Linux and $190 each for other Unix platforms.

Prices assume an exchange rate of 0.64 with the US dollar. No hard copy documentation ships, and installation has to be done from a limited number of CDs. Freight is not included in the above prices, but should be very small. GST will be payable for that portion of the license after 1 July 2000, but the university should be able to claim this back.

How to participate in a University purchase

Requests, and offers to volunteer to coordinate a purchase, were collected via a Web form on this page until 29 November 1999.

Update 1 December: At least the threshold of 20 seems to have been achieved. Thanks very much to Meredith Jordan for volunteering to deal with the next stage: please send any further requests or enquiries by email to mjtj@chem.usyd.edu.au. A new ITC working party secretary is being appointed from mid-January and also may be able to help with coordination.

JSR, Sydney Mathematics and Statistics, 1 Dec 1999 . . . SiteSearch