Summer 2015 (6/25/2015)

• ChemIT charged the $1,800 department license to the ChemIT account.

Details and context

Michael Lenetsky approved this process of having the department cover the cost.

• Enforcement hard (impossible?) since software doesn't require a licensing renewal. (This is unlike MatLab and Mathematica.)
• Benefits some research groups, much as the department subsidizes (to a greater degree) some groups who use ChemIT's computational server support services, such as clusters.

50+    $2600 for the site; approx. $50 per machine

An alternative is get research groups to pay the cost proportional to their use. Here's what happened when this was tried summer 2015: ChemIT was only able to get pledges for $1,300 from research groups for the use of LabVIEW for the 2015-2016 year (26 seats at $50 each). That left out groups who had chosen not to respond.

We guessed there would be about 36 seats, hence the $50 amount to collect the $1,800 needed. And if more than 36 seats were pledged, then we could lower the price per seat.

To hedge against free riders, we could then submit a "research group charge-back" spreadsheet to Kevin and then somehow hold the software back from users in non-payment groups.

FYI, for the 26 seats pledged, we heard from the following research groups:

• Freed
• Marohn
• Petersen
• Park

We had expected to also have heard from:

• Zax (who just worked with us on LabVIEW )
• Abruna (used extensively around the group)
• Disalvo (used on a machine or two)
• Others?