Contributing to Psychtoolbox
How to contribute financially to the development and upkeep of the toolbox
Continued development, improvement, maintenance and support of Psychtoolbox itself, and also improvement of the various open-source software components on which Psychtoolbox and other neuroscience toolkits (e.g., PsychoPy) critically depend, including improvements to the Linux operating system as the strongest and most high quality foundation for demanding stimulation and data collection paradigms, requires a lot of highly qualified and highly focused work.
This work is currently (year 2006 - present) mostly carried out by Mario Kleiner, who is now employed to do this work by the Medical Innovations Incubator GmbH (MII) in Tuebingen, Germany. The MII belongs by 100% to the non-profit foundation for medical innovations in Tuebingen.
In order to fund Mario’s work and provide him with the resources to do this job, the MII offers different types of paid services around Psychtoolbox and the use of Linux for neuroscience, among them a “Psychtoolbox Support Membership”.
Your lab can now financially contribute to Psychtoolbox sustainability, upkeep and continued improvement, by once a year buying such a membership for a modest fee. This membership entitles you to some paid support for questions regarding efficient use of Psychtoolbox, questions regarding the resolution of issues you may have with it, fixing of bugs you may encounter, and feature requests. MII also offers paid feature development and other commercial services.
Please visit the following website, operated by MII, for our offering of commercial development services, and for the “Psychtoolbox Support Membership”:
The membership allows you to get your voice heard by the developers regarding future feature development, as well as preferential treatment on the public Psychtoolbox user forum and GitHub issue tracker. Spare income generated by your membership fee, that does not have to be used to process paid requests made individually by you, will be used to fund general development and upkeep of Psychtoolbox and its ecosystem. In other words, it contributes to / acts as an insurance that allows Psychtoolbox to be around and in good shape years into the future.
To clarify: Psychtoolbox itself will stay freely downloadable and useable by anyone, and stay fully accessible as open-source software, by anyone for any purpose. Anybody able and willing to contribute code and ideas of sufficiently high quality is invited to contribute to the open-source code, the documentation on this public community website and Wiki, and to participate and help each other on the public community forum.
Professional support on the forum or the bug trackers by our main developer will be reserved to paying community members.
Thanks for your participation and support!
How to help develop the toolbox
With Psychtoolbox-3 we have moved to an open source development model, and we welcome contributions from users like yourself. If you improve a particular M file in the Psychtoolbox, we’ll want to incorporate your improved version into the toolbox. Just send us a patch or a pull request in Github against the psychtoolbox-3/psychtoolbox-3 repo.
How to help impove the website
We welcome user contributions and improvements to this website.
Adding material to the wiki portion only requires a GitHub login. You are encouraged to add FAQ entries there concerning common issues, programming pitfalls, or reports about hardware.
To improve the website itself please click the “Edit and fork this page” below and send us a pull request with your changes.
The website is auto-generated from markdown text in the psychtoolbox-3/psychtoolbox-3.github.com repo.
When you get (or just see) a particularly helpful answer on the forum, we’ll all be grateful if you would add it to the Psychtoolbox FAQ to everyone’s benefit. You may want to edit it a bit, deleting the irrelevant and perhaps making the relevant context more explicit.