Is SMath no longer distributed as freeware in commercial settings?

I noticed https://en.smath.com now has a banner stating free for personal usage with plans for organizations.



The license here: https://en.smath.com/view/SMathStudio/license mentions free for private use, with paid options to expand private usage. This clause has been added to the EULA from what was shipped with the last beta I downloaded.

Edited by moderator 19 March 2022 02:29:53(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Hello.

The currently available stable version (0.99.7822) and all previous ones still can be used for commercial purposes for free as they have the previous version of license agreement built-in. But the next stable release of SMath Studio will have an updated EULA: https://en.smath.com/view/SMathStudio/license

It happened because:
1) Receiving donations is not available in my country anymore;
2) Cloud version requires regular maintanance and hardware updates.

Changes are:
1) Cloud version will be limited for free users soon (it is about the number of Worksheets, the number of Regions on the Worksheet, CPU time for evaluation, disk space for user content, revisioning functionality)
2) Desktop version will be free for private usage only.

Good news:
1) I remember about those who made donations (I will compensate their support by discounts to the paid plans);
2) If monetization will succeed it will give a Project a chance to grow faster to be more professional.

Sorry guys, but this crazy world requires some changes.

Ooof.

I understand why you need to make this change, but I am still a bit surprised and disappointed. Realistically, this will likely limit or end my future use of SMath as I use it primarily for work purposes.

Just had a chuckle... maybe Jean was onto something. Long live 6179.

I do wish the best for you and SMath, though. It's a great piece of software and the online community is one of the best.

Edit: I will be contributing to a year of an Advanced Personal License to support SMath for the time being.

Edited by user 17 March 2022 04:01:34(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

I don't think that our university would go bankrupt because of $600 per year.
Even if it was possible to officialy order software licenses from Russia and to make payments to Russian suppliers, there is another issue.

Teaching SMath Studio at university is sensible if the students can expect SMath Studio to be available at their later jobs.
With the program being free for commercial use, no boss would complain about the software being used, except in cases of strict software policies. Yet, if I think it twice, today many of them might forbid installation of Russian software at all. Even if they didn't forbid all western software when Belgrad was bombed.

I absolutely agree that there should be a way to collect money for the further development of the software and also for the living of the developer.

I strongly recommend to not split the license plans based on use case but rather based on features/added value.

Let the base version be free and only charge for advanced features (which should not affect math functionality but rather convenience and productivity features).

This would allow any employee to try and use SMath in the job. Once the use is that intense that convenience features and support become essential, then there should be no problem to justify expenses on licence plans.

My proposal as to what could be charged for:
- priority support
- online version, perhaps with collaborative features (multi-user edit sessions)
- advanced text processing
- export to viewer (keep the viewer preview free)
- special purpose plugins from the program developers

What I'd recommend to keep free:
- Core functions in up-to-date version.
- Access to all third party plugins and to (optional) automatic update.

Given that potential users care about license agreements or that the plans can be enforced by some protection technique, there will be a split in the user community into those who upgrade and those who don't. Consequences:
- Once the versions diverge a lot, bug reports or questions from old version users will become less helpful for the developers.
- The user base for new features will be much smaller, so the maturity for commercial users would be worse than it could be.
- upgrading to a commercial plan will involve first contact to a new version, which the private test user doesn't know yet, that might frighten off quite some of potential customers.

It has always been discouraged in the forum to discuss problems with older versions of the program, because no one wants to waste time discussing problems which could be solved by using up-to-date version. Jean^10 so to say.
Automatic update is not for the benefit of the user but for the benefit of the developer and the support community. So why discouraging this?

On the other side, I'd consider it completely legitimate to handle user questions either by pointing to free solutions/workarounds or to commercial solutions within the same user forum.

Whatever the decision, I whish the project sustainable commercial success.

100% agree and I can easily imagine that a company like the one I'm working in would follow the same criteria listed by mkraska to take a decision about a new software.
Giving the tools to the end user and letting him understand the software deeply, it has already proven (in our company) to be one key element that lead to purchase a particular software.
One quick example: we used to mark-up vendor engineering documents and drawings with free pdf editors. It is ok, it works, it has worked and always will.
We had the chanche to test a paid editor, smart and tailored for engineering markups, and after a deep test phase our company bought a lot of licensees. They paid not for additional functionality or core featurs, but for a tailored software that has speed-up (a lot) what we where already doing (profitably) with free pdf editors...



In my opinion, support, the advanced text processing and full "Viewer" features, are especially interesting for companies. Plugins from developers, may be , may be not.
I totally agree on the "keep free" list proposed by mkraska

Edited by user 17 March 2022 17:56:58(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Ok, let me think about it.

Good catch by Hildebrando
Companies would be interested in the formatting capabilities that would allow to quickly prepare a document for an external reader (i.e. a client, an authorized inspecor, some third party etc..), task which is somehow time consuming and difficult with SMath today: for a company it is not worth to spend 2 or 3 man-hours of an employee with engineering knowledge/capabilities, just to prepare a "good looking" final document (after the engineering calculation is already done and checked). For instance, some specific commercial softwares will print a comprehensive report of everything that has been designed with a single click (I'm thinking at the softwares I use on a daily basis, related to pressure vessels engineering). Nobody likes to use time of engineers to post-process the results into a report

So, powerful formatting could be paid feature, related to "productivity" (Martin split is still valid), while the "math side" remains free for every user (for his own calculations and internal checks, but without powerful publishing tools).
TOC may be paid or free: it is mainly used for post-processing, but could be also a good feature to organize the calculation steps themselves (today we use collapsible areas mainly)... I think it's up to Andrey (as everything else )

Edit: of course I would highly prefer that Smath kept the "free" philosophy that was in place before all this mess happened, but I can understand the difficulties in the current situation.

Edited by user 18 March 2022 10:34:04(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Andrey, thank you for clarification/adjustments.

The free version is going to be better than even proposed in the discussion. Of course we know that anything may change at any time.

Yet some Questions:

- What are the differences between advanced and basic viewer features going to be?
- Cloud version is not mentioned in the free version. Does that imply no access in that case? What will happen to existing sheets in the cloud?
- What legal situation do Russia, Belarus and Ukraine have in common?

You can't be more right Andrey !
Lovely Viacheslav Russia for ever
Poor Occident w/o Titanium, w/o Magnesium, much less Aluminum.
Some countries freezing cold.
I have double ancestry: Iran and Mongolia
Take care ... Jean.

Maybe the union state will soon be a troika. The collateral damage (besides tens of thousands of death people) of this will be the strengthening of the US sponsored intermarium from the baltic to the black sea as a wedge between Germany and Russia. So the dream of the US empire comes true: Keep America in, keep the Russians out and keep the Germans down.

And the the Germans happily agree on harming themselves by cutting relations to Russia. We have our own import substitution now, it is called "freeze for peace". The US are looking forward to sell us their fracking gas and the nuclear micro-powerplants by Bill Gates. Not to speak of their F35 and nukes.

Russians in Germany now are target of officially lighted hatred and bullying much like the Russlanddeutschen were in WW2. The media had a good practice ground for hatred and bullying: promoting the vaccination campaign by seeding hatred against those who dont't want to take part in the gentech mass experiment. Interestingly, those who profit from the pandemia and from the current war are the same. And both in Wuhan and on the Maidan, american money was involved.

Let us see how soon "freezing for peace" will calm down the minds in the west. The best we can hope for now is that the SMath community will be a hole in the new iron fence.