>Psychtoolbox>PsychDocumentation

If you are using a Psychtoolbox variant and version that requires a paid
software license key to function, e.g., on Microsoft Windows or Apple
macOS, then a few minutes of basic support per year for basic questions
may be included in the specific type of software license you bought. If,
when, and how much support will be provided is usually at the discretion
of the Psychtoolbox team. In any case, if you wanted to ask for this
basic support, you’d have to present an authentication token by running
this function, or by calling PsychLicenseHandling(‘AuthenticationToken’).

If you require additional paid support regarding Psychtoolbox, or custom feature
development (or if you want to buy a Psychtoolbox themed coffee mug, bag or shirt)
go to the following website which provides such services:

https://www.psychtoolbox.net

For paid support on the user forum or GitHub issue tracker, buy a
“Psychtoolbox support membership” under the “become a member” section:

https://www.psychtoolbox.net/#service

1. As part of your purchase, you will receive a document - an invoice - with a
   printed “Order Id” or “Order no.”, and a printed “License key”.

2. Next you can run *this* function PsychPaidSupportAndServices in Octave or
   Matlab. The function will ask you if you need paid support and do have
   an active license key to prove your community membership. Answer “y” for yes.

3. Next the function will ask you about your “Order Id” and “License key”.
   Please enter that info that you got from step 1.

4. The function will print out an “authentication token”, a string of letters and
   numbers. Now you can post your question on the Psychtoolbox user forum at
   https://psychtoolbox.discourse.group or open a new issue for bugs and feature
   requests on our GitHub issue tracker at https://github.com/Psychtoolbox-3/Psychtoolbox-3/issues

   Please add the “authentication token” to your forum question or GitHub issue.
   This will prove to us that you deserve paid support for your question or
   issue. Please note that initial activation of your license key may take 5-10
   days after date of receipt of payment, so do not buy the paid support last
   minute, when the “house is already burning”, but ahead of time, like you
   would do with a fire insurance.

For more detailed background information about Psychtoolbox’s need for funding, read on:

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 ( https://www.mi-incubator.com ).
The MII belongs by 100% to the non-profit foundation for medical
innovations ( http://www.mi-foundation.org ) 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 community membership with paid support”.

Your lab can now financially contribute to Psychtoolbox sustainability,
upkeep and continued improvement, by once a year buying such a community
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 community membership with
paid support:

https://www.psychtoolbox.net

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 open-source software. 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 our
public community website and Wiki
http://psychtoolbox.org, and to participate and help each other on the
public community forum https://psychtoolbox.discourse.group.

Support by our developers will be reserved to paying community members.

Thanks for your participation and support!