Home License Limitations and Service Maintenance renewal cost

So I purchased Matlab Home license last year only to find out that the license does not include Embedded Coder which was one of my key requirements. Since then every once in a while i will run into some kind of limitation hindering / delaying my projects. Today when i opened my Matlab application and wanted to install a add-on package but the app store refused to open saying my "service maintenance" has expired and wants to charge me ~200 AUD + $40 per addon which is almost 50% of the amount i paid for this license which i find is rediculious. Its like paying fee to access google app store before i can actually buy any app. I am starting to get really frusted with Mathworks cost model and am beginning to see why social media is filled with posts and videos titled "Alternatives to Matlab".

From computation point of view there is no added benifit of using Matlab over any open source project like GUI octave and the true value of this product comes from its extensive app library (paid and free). Having paid hundreds of $$ for a perpetual home license i expect "perpetual" access to the add ons that I have paid for as well as the one available to Matlab users for free but now that my maintenance is expired, I will not be able to do so. Also, I suspect that if i have to install Matlab on a new computer, I will loose all the free add-ons currently installed on my computer. This is pethatic and i hope Mathswork sales team will rethink what they wish to achieve with the "home license" product.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

i expect "perpetual" access to the add ons that I have paid for as well as the one available to Matlab users for free but now that my maintenance is expired, I will not be able to do so.

You do have perpetual access to what you have paid for. You paid for a copy of a particular release of MATLAB, and for toolboxes for that release. You did not pay for perpetual updates to MATLAB or the toolboxes.

You can download most of the free add-ons from the File Exchange if the Add-On Manager is for some reason not working for adding the free content.

Also, I suspect that if i have to install Matlab on a new computer, I will loose all the free add-ons currently installed on my computer.

Your Home license is valid for installation on one computer. A limited number of times per year, you can permanently transfer it to a different computer. When you do that, the license gets associated with the new computer, and which add-ons and toolboxes you can access goes along with the license.

Any toolbox that you have paid for can be installed with the Installer; installing paid toolboxes with the Add-On Manager is a nice touch that just invokes the installer on your behalf. Even if you no longer have a support contract, when you use the installer and log in and indicate your license, then you will be permitted to download up to the last version of the toolbox that you paid for.

i hope Mathswork sales team will rethink what they wish to achieve with the "home license" product

Mathworks spends a lot of money on software development. They have roughly 5000 employees; I estimate that roughly 2/3 of those are involved in development (including documentation and testing.)

Student users expect MATLAB to be free. Home users expect MATLAB to be free. A lot of Educational users expect MATLAB to be free.

Is it fair to put all of the costs for developing and maintaining MATLAB onto the commercial / professional users?

I pay more than $A200 per year just for subscriptions to administrative tools to keep my Windows systems in working order -- and I don't do much Windows work. That excludes any compiler licenses (Microsoft tells me I am not eligible for the VS Community editions because I purchased "Microsoft Office for the Home and Family" twice in a 30 year span, and so accidentally hit lifetime license limits before they consider you to be a commercial developer. The least expensive VS option available to me is over $A10000 per year.)

Software does not write itself. Software does not automatically adjust itself to new operating systems. Someone has to pay for the continued efforts to refine the product; you are a user of the product, and if you want to be able to user later versions of the product than what you paid for, you should be expecting to pay money.

[Prashant]

Great effort in responding to my comment but you completely missed my point. I am not asking for anything free and am well aware of the labour that goes in product development. What I was wanted to flag is these small nuisances that come with the software license which the user is not made aware of upfront. Let me break it down for your convenience:

1. Access to Add on feature - When I purchased MATLAB the Add-Ons button was an easy way for me to add remove packages as per my day's need which changes from project to project. Now that button doesn't work anymore and unless I pay for annual maintenance there is no easy way for me to manage add ons on my computer. And just to be clear I am not asking for free updates but access to the ones that were available to me on the date of purchase.
2. Limiting number of transfers per year - Although I can understand the requirement of activating license on each install, I'm not sure why should I waste my time requesting MATLAB customer support to allow me to activate the same license on a new computer? There is already an online activation and Deactivation process which should limit the number of active instances to one which, I believe is what MathWorks is trying to achieve. Normally I'd change my OS about a dozen times a year and switch my development environment between windows and Linux so this license transfer limitation is nothing but another nuisance i have to deal with.

PS – Last time I contacted MathWorks support team to understand the limitations of home license I was reminded 2-3 times on the same call that my home license cannot be used for commercial purpose as if i was planning to breach the license condition and now that I am asking access to the packages that I paid for, you responded in manner that I am asking for free stuff. I am beginning to understand the work culture at Mathworks.

[Walter Roberson]

Unfortunately at the moment, the one license I have that is not under support, is a license from before the Add-On Manager was created, so I cannot test that condition for myself.

When you talk about Add-Ons are you talking about user File Exchange Contributions such as export_fig ? Because those can be handled through File Exchange if need be.

Are you talking about Support Packages such as Ti C2000 Hardware Support Package ? There is a way to handle those without going through the Add-On Manager, but it is admittedly not nearly as convenient. (There is a special installer primarily intended to use to download Hardware Support Packages for use on machines that do not have internet connection.)

Are you talking about Toolboxes such as Statistics and Machine Learning Toolbox? Those can be handled by the software installer.

It would take me a while to come up with anything that is available through the Add-On Installer that is not covered by one of those three cases.

The $US45 price for Home licenses is for additional toolboxes -- ones that you have not purchased already.

As you are quoting a lower price, $AUD40, I suspect the price you are quoting is for extending Software Maintenance Service for those toolboxes. Software Maintenance Service for Home license is the fee to be eligible for any upgrades during the duration of the contract -- e.g., if you were under SMS at the time that R2020b is to be released, then you would be eligible to use R2020b for MATLAB and all of the toolboxes you have purchased. If you do not pay that fee, you do not lose access to any software you have paid for: you just do not get upgrades. Your software will not stop working if you do not pay for a support contract.

However, if you do not have SMS, then there is a limited period during which you are eligible to purchase additional toolboxes (that you have not already paid for) for your current release. I do not know what the current policy is; at one time it was two years (e.g., if your last eligible release was R2018b then you could purchase up to when R2020a was current; I do not remember the timing details after that.) So without SMS, you would lose the ability to purchase additional toolboxes, but not immediately.

One thing that will stop working immediately is that without SMS, you would lose access to the archived MATLAB documentation for previous releases, https://www.mathworks.com/help/doc-archives.html and would need to rely upon you installed documentation ("help" and "doc") for your release.

The limited number of license transfers per year does not apply if you are staying with the same hardware identifiers (mostly build-in Media Access Control addresses, but historically hard disk serial number for Windows only). You can have any number of activations in any number of operating systems on the same hardware. You do not pay for MATLAB per operating system: you pay per hardware system (for Home license). The activation / deactivation process has to do with transfering to new hardware.

Historically, Mathworks has had problems with both students and commercial companies abusing unlimited host transfers: people were passing the software on from person to person, sometimes a number of times per day, to avoid having to buy enough licenses. Mathworks got burnt on that, so they put in some limit on transfers. Mathworks might potentially fine-tune the number of transfers permitted per year, but it is unlikely that they will remove the limit.

[Prashant]

So instead of securing your software with technologies like HASP keys, as most software companies are using these days, Mathworks has decided to stick with their old model and make the lives of their existing customers more difficult. Hope the management realize that this will work only till some company like Tesla comes out and disrupts the market. Until then I guess we will just have to live with the way things work here. Thanks for your detailed comments.. Hopefully other planning to buy Home license will find this useful.

[Walter Roberson]

Dongles are a real pain to work with in corporate environments, and even for serious home users. They proliferate, but computers do not have enough ports to have one dongle for each major software package.

My 10 USB ports are already full, and I need more ports; I am having to plug and unplug devices already.

Dongles cannot be centrally managed. And There is no common standard between vendors that would permit multiple licenses from different vendors to be stored on the same dongle.

When dongles are not getting lost, they also break.

For corporate work, it is more common to be moving to security identification devices that permit users to uniquely identify themselves to devices they log in at, at which point the license rights stored on the license server are accessed.

One problem with dongles is that students pass them around, since most of them just authenticate that a license exists, rather than authenticating that the active user is the authorized user of the license.