>Psychtoolbox

PsychLicenseHandling - Manage Psychtoolbox software licensing.

This function facilitates the setup and administration of license
management for Psychtoolbox on operating systems and platforms that
require either a paid license or a time-limited free trial.

Once license management is configured for your operating system and
hardware, you can manage your license, including activation and
deactivation on a machine, checking licensing status, and generating a
support authentication token.

For information on purchasing license keys for Psychtoolbox, visit:

https://www.psychtoolbox.net

The prebuilt, tested, and supported mex files included in Psychtoolbox
are provided by our commercial host company, Medical Innovations
Incubator GmbH, as of November 2024. Contact details are as follows:

Medical Innovations Incubator GmbH
Eisenbahnstr. 63
72070 Tübingen
Germany

Commercial register: HRB 751684
Register court: Local court Stuttgart, Germany

For general and data protection inquiries, email: info@mi-incubator.com
For Psychtoolbox questions, email: psychtoolbox@mi-incubator.com

The data protection and privacy statements related to Psychtoolbox
software license management and associated data collection and processing
can be found at:

https://www.psychtoolbox.net/data-protection

Once a license has been activated online, you can use the Psychtoolbox
mex files offline for a limited number of days without an active internet
connection. After this offline period, the mex files will stop working
until an internet connection is reestablished. During each startup,
Psychtoolbox will inform you of the remaining days of offline use before
your computer must connect to the internet while Psychtoolbox is running.
Each successful connection to the license servers will reset the offline
use period to its maximum duration. When connected to the internet,
Psychtoolbox will sync with the server at the first use in a session and
periodically every few hours.

Subfunctions and their meaning

PsychLicenseHandling(‘Setup’);

• Informs the user about the purpose of license management, asks them for
  consent to enable license management, and performs initial setup to get
  to working mex files for license managed Psychtoolboxes. This function
  can be manually called by users, but by default it is called by the
  Psychtoolbox setup/install/update routines to automate license onboarding.

PsychLicenseHandling(‘Activate’ [, licenseKey]);

• Activate a paid license on a machine + operating system combination.
  This can either use a previously enrolled license key from earlier calls
  of PsychLicenseHandling(‘Activate’) or PsychLicenseHandling(‘Setup’), or
  providing a new license key to activate the machine with a new license,
  by providing the new key in a string as optional ‘licenseKey’ parameter.

This function can also be used if your machine was offline longer than
allowed and your local activation needs to be refreshed, or if your old
license has expired, or been suspended for some reason, then been resumed
or extended by you, and you need Psychtoolbox to refresh its view of the
current licensing state. If things don’t work for some licensing related
reason, calling PsychLicenseHandling(‘Activate’) may fix many problems.

PsychLicenseHandling(‘Deactivate’);

• Deactivate a currently activated machine + operating system combination,
  for the purpose of freeing up one activation, so a different machine +
  operating system combination can be activated instead. This allows you to
  “shift around” which machines can be used if your license only allows a
  limited number of simultaneous activations on a limited number of
  machines, and you temporarily have more machines than available
  activations.

PsychLicenseHandling(‘WipeLicense’);

• Deactivate a license on a machine and wipe the license key permanently
  if you don’t intend to use that license on this machine anymore, e.g., if
  you are about to decomission a machine, or no longer use that license.

active = PsychLicenseHandling(‘IsLicensed’ [, feature]);

• Check if this installation of Psychtoolbox currently has a valid and
  active license, and possibly print some information about the licensing
  status, e.g., license expiry date, or how long the machine can still be
  used offline. If the optional ‘feature’ parameter is provided as a name
  string, then checks if that specific subfeature is enabled by the
  currently active license.

PsychLicenseHandling(‘AuthenticationToken’);

• Print an authentication token which allows you to prove that your
  machine has a properly paid, valid and active license associated with it.
  Our professional support personnel may ask you to provide such a token in
  some cases.