ICARUS goes fully commercial :(

[yog]

I don't normally condone swearing on the internet ...... but **** me, talk about a price hike :eek:

Previously
Non-commercial licence = Free
Commercial licence = £750 ($1125USD)

Now the only version available will be £3000 ($4500USD):eek:

Hell's teeth, I better make sure I have a couple back-ups of the previously free downloadable one :shrug:

[Mauritius]

I guess that using one of these is illegal now. Wasn't the free license granted subject to change anytime?

.mm

[ndog]

Anybody know where the last free version can be downloaded?

[Mauritius]

What's the point if it's illegal to use now?
You could also ask where to download a warez version of MatchMover, Boujou etc.

.mm

[FBMachine]

According to the Personal use license:
"This License entitles the Licensee to a royalty-free non-exclusive non-transferable end-user license to use the Software solely for non-commercial purposes and for no other purposes."

And the only condition for them being able to terminate the license are:
"MIL shall have the right to terminate this License forthwith should the Licensee be in breach of any of its terms. The Licensee shall forthwith on demand deliver up to MIL the Software supplied by MIL plus any back-up copy(ies) as well as delete any copy(ies) of the Software from its computer(s)."

So it's safe to use the personal version if you already have it and agreed to the license, because nowhere in the license did they reserve the right to terminate the license for such reasons as making the software commercial only.
Dan

[EDIT] Forgot to add: THIS SUCKS.

[Mauritius]

So it's safe to use the personal version if you already have it and agreed to the license, because nowhere in the license did they reserve the right to terminate the license for such reasons as making the software commercial only.
You are right. But sadly only in this very case; from the license:

REDISTRIBUTION
The Licensee shall not reproduce or distribute the Software.


So it is not legal to give anyone a copy.

Of course, it is hard to proove that someone hasn't downloaded it, hehe.



.mm

[Velly]

Wow, that`s very bad news :-(
I`ve tried Icarus and I liked it a lot; because it was free to try out, all the nice features (3D matchmoving, stabilizing, clean plate, imagemodelling) in one package and it`s very reasonable price.

But from what I understand from the PixelFarm webpage http://www.thepixelfarm.co.uk/news.html
the £3000 PFTtrack program only does the matchmoving part !!
So you`ll get less for more.....

[xzevlin]

That really bites. There's so little good free software as it is. I was worried that something like this might happen, so I downloaded a version of Icarus a few weeks ago.

I guess the moral of the story is make sure you grab something when you can, and if something is free expect the developers to realize they can make money off of it regardless of how many hearts they break.

[vfx]

I even sent these guys an email thanking them for their efforts and educational free software - After all, they are a University...??? Don't these guys feel any shame for this turn, just for money, if you ask me they were getting good advertising before this!!

P.s. My perosnal free copy doesn't seem to function now - anyone else found this?

[msp]

> After all, they are a University...??? Don't these
> guys feel any shame for this turn, just for
> money, if you ask me they were getting good
> advertising before this!!

They may be academics, but most academic institutions have divisions whose job it is to commercially exploit anything the pure research groups produce.

Simon and his team at the AIG have done a good job in developing Icarus, you can hardly blame them if the University of Manchesters' commercial arm feel the work should be exploited.

(After all, the team need to get paid somehow, it would become much harder to persuade research councils that THEY should fund work which industry is benefiting from...industry should pay for it itself.)

Martin Preston

[ndog]

What bites is that a lot of people spent lots of time testing the software and giving feedback to the developers in the hope that a free reduced capacity version would remain available.

Many of these same people were enthusiastically drumming up support for the software. I think that the developers killed any chance of a community following for their software.

Mauritius : Don't jump to conclusions, my question had nothing do with warez or an illegal version of Icarus.

[malducin]

Unfortunately Martin hit it in the head.

The part that gets me is that isn't research in part funded by tax dollars? The problem is the lose of principle in Universities, I mean their research should be in the interest of the public, not for the profit of just a few. What happens to life saving drugs or revolutinary discoveries??? I guess I'm a bit ticked off :-/

BTW, does anyone know what the last released version was. I downloaded it a few months ago. Hopefully I have a fairly recent one.

[vfx]

I can understand some of ur points, but don't u think as they're a University, they should still have an Educational free version?? Seems a little too unrealistic a price tab, it aint afterall anything like matchmover, or boujou, or scenegenie, all which are cheaper, and have made much more progress in the testing arena. - Hope they haven't shot themselves in the foot, thats my 2 cents.

[ALBEDO]

Originally posted by malducin
Unfortunately Martin hit it in the head.


BTW, does anyone know what the last released version was. I downloaded it a few months ago. Hopefully I have a fairly recent one.

The most recent version is (was) 2.09.

ALBEDO

[beaker]

Originally posted by malducin
Unfortunately Martin hit it in the head.

The part that gets me is that isn't research in part funded by tax dollars? The problem is the lose of principle in Universities, I mean their research should be in the interest of the public, not for the profit of just a few. What happens to life saving drugs or revolutinary discoveries??? I guess I'm a bit ticked off :-/

BTW, does anyone know what the last released version was. I downloaded it a few months ago. Hopefully I have a fairly recent one.
This has been happening for years. Many technologies are developed at universities and "bought" up by companies. Fluidfx from a/w is based on alot of Jos Stam's research from the university of toronto. The guy that developed deep shadows created them while he was at MIT and then he was hired up by pixar and they patented the technology. There are a thousand more examples of this. Just look at any of the papers out of siggraph and the authors websites. Many were working at a university when they came up with some cool new way to do something and then they were quickly hired up by someone after they published papers on the tech they researched.

Companies have been doing this for years and years.

[ndog]

What I'm seeing now is that the universities patent new technologies they develop and then sell licenses to companies interested in using the technology.

[Pyro2301]

Originally posted by vfx
it aint afterall anything like matchmover, or boujou, or scenegenie, all which are cheaper


Boujou is cheaper? Hmmm you better check up on that because last I heard it was more than double what Icarus is now.

I've tried Icarus in production and I really wasn't impressed. Yes it tracked shots that Boujou said it couldn't figure out...but the data it gave me was totally useless. I think the work they're doing is great and I'm interested in Icarus's potential in the future.

If they want to drop the free version then that's their choice. The money will (hopefully) go to improve the speed of their R&D and benefit the community by making a decent tracker better. Ya it sucks if your a student but honestly it's their software and they can do whatever they want with it. If your really bent out of shape go get educated and make your own. Pour a few years of your life and hard work into it and give it to the world for free. :hmm:

We should really be thanking them for giving it away for free for this long :)

-Victor

[beaker]

Boujou and 3dequalizer are 10k, matchmover is 5k, Scenegenie is 1k, but it only works with 3dsmax.

[yog]

I'm not anoyed that Icarus has gone wholely commercial, it is inevetable in a way.
And I'm not concerned that it started as a public beta and free prodect, moved to partially commercial and then moved to fully commercial, there has been plenty of preseident for this, most notibly Rhino 3D.

What I am concerned about is the amount of the price hike:surprised . There are plenty of match moving solutions for the high end market, but Icarus was initially marketed at the small studios and hobbiests, but now it has jumped to one of the more expensive solutions, pricing many out of the running :shrug:

[Tex3D]

Don't worry guys. Now that they jacked up the price they have to sell the damn thing. Icarus was good, but certainly NOT GREAT. If they think that everyone is going to run out and buy it they are nuts. Now we'll see if they can keep up with better software

-Dave

Isn't Icarus the one that tried to fly too close to the sun and and fell ..HARD!

hmmmm:hmm:

[Freak]

I think that Icarus, is worth nowhere near what they are now asking.... It will have to drop it's price to around 1 > 3K just to survive. MatchMover 2.5 simply rocks! And would be my first choice by far...

However we did get to use Icarus, for free!

And basically Universities would not fund such programs, in the first place, if there was not the chance that something like a commercial application could come from it...

This is indeed the whole idea of funding such a project.

In most countries Universities are under funded, and require such actions to maintain them. It's a fact of life, and is hardly a new idea with Icarus.

I downloaded the latest Icarus 2.09 on March 6th.....
So i guess that was a good move.. :)

Boujou was a breakthrough, but at it's price it can also go to hell, it also can't do everything that MM can...
Although it does do somethings easier...

Personally i applaude the people behind Icarus for letting us use it at all..... Most universities don't make there projects publically available unless your a student associated with the project..

[dark_lotus]

Yeaup. Sad day my friends.

[malducin]

Well as far as funding it doesn't have to be necessarily that way. I mean if funding was all about getting commercial applications, most sciences and arts would simply perish. What possible commercial app could you get out of Astronomy, paleontology, Sculpting, Dance, etc. They would be dead. Second there are other options. After all the Linux kernel, which was just a school project, has gone pretty far and you could basicly still get it for free. And besides how much money did the University get from selling or licensing Icarus, probably pennies compared to what the new deal plans to make.

Then there is the question of what Univerisities stand for today, you know altruism and all that. And as they say they are standing there because of the shoulder of giants, because people shared their knowledge. Heck what if say Jensen had patented photon mapping a few years ago and only one company sold a renderer that used it (more or less what happened actually when it was incorporated into Mental Ray if I remember right). They could have had a closed beta cycle or something else to get feedback etc. I'm sure some people who can't afford Bojou or Matchmover gladly tested it and contributed invaluable info. Will make them weary next time they try to test something new. Then you could have something like what happened to Entropy, they could go under, get sued, etc. and Icarus not only is stopped from being sold but redistribution is forbidden and no more work will be done to it. Effectuvely abandonware and all that work gone to waste.

Now I'm not saying that Univerisites shouldn't look into ways of getting money, exploiting their research (thereis still the question of who owns it, the Univeristy or the researchers or both) and especially for the researchers themselves getting some reward for their hard work. It just seems that more and more the complete explotation and patenting of Univeristy research is the only concern. What happens when the next life saving drug is discovered at a Univerisity? Hehe or as the Slashdot crowd would put it, it's good that Newton didn't patent calculus or the concept of gravity ;-).

I guess I'm just too tired, too much rambling ;-).

[Mauritius]

Yeah, I read an interview a while ago when the Exluna lawsuit resulted in Entropy & BMRT being discontinued. I don't remember who was being interviewd but what I remember was that he said he'd always wondered why everbody was talking about new 'cognitions' in math but new 'inventions' in computer graphics. If you look at the average tech. paper, it's full of math. Express this math as an algorithm and you can get a patent on it (Ok, not here, in Germany) ...

Here's (http://groups.google.de/groups?hl=de&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=c90fdc3.0212241707.837914c%40posting.google.com) an interesting thread on this topic.

.mm

[msp]

Originally posted by malducin
Then you could have something like what happened to Entropy, they could go under, get sued, etc. and Icarus not only is stopped from being sold but redistribution is forbidden and no more work will be done to it. Effectuvely abandonware and all that work gone to waste.
.

I'm not disagreeing with your more general points about the awkwardness of industries interaction with academia, but your specific point about Icarus no longer being developed is incorrect.

Email Simon and ask him, i'm sure he'll be very amenable to explaining the situation. Pixel Farm are dealing with distribution and tailoring the technology to commercial markets. Simon and the rest of the team at Manchester are continuing to pursue related research.

(I did my degrees at Manchester University many years ago, which is how i know some of this)

Martin Preston

[SimonG]

Originally posted by msp
Simon and the rest of the team at Manchester are continuing to pursue related research.


I am one of the Icarus developers, and I would like to say that we will definitely be continuing with the research that has grown out of Icarus.

We are verry sorry about any bad feeling that has been caused by us removing the free download of Icarus, but please understand that, as researchers, we are primarily interested in trying to investigate how we can develop this work and try to take it further than we have been able to so far.

As a university research group, we have little experience of the day-to-day requirements of "real" post production work. We hope that a collaboration with people who have professional experience in this industry will enable us to enhance the software and produce tools that really help people with their every-day work. Given the financial pressure that universities are under today, this has meant that a commercial cooperation with an existing company has been the best way for us to try to take our work to a new level.

We are very sorry that some of the existing users of the free version of Icarus have felt a bit hard-done by, but please understand that all we want to do is to produce tools that "really work", and in the current climate, a commercial route the the best (and possibly only...) approach that we can take.

Best wishes,

Simon
-

[SimonG]

Originally posted by Pyro2301
Ya it sucks if your a student but honestly it's their software and they can do whatever they want with it.

To anybody who is a student, please keep an eye on The Pixel Farm web site (http://www.thepixelfarm.co.uk), as a student licensing scheme for the new tracking software may well be annouced soon.

Best wishes,

Simon
-

[hairy_llama]

I was waiting for icarus to become more stable and usable and would probably have bought it evntually because it's price was decent. No way that is going to happen now that its $4,500.

[malducin]

Martin and Simon:

Thanks for the explanations, which is even better after the abrupt change of its status. As I mentioned if anything Simon and the folks at Manchester are the ones that deserve any compensation. I'm indeed grateful for having been allowed to play with this nifty app, although not enough to provide any useful feedback. Maybe I would have preferred the handling a bit different. I'm just weary after the BMRT/Entropy fiasco.

Anyways I wish the folks good luck and success over there, and hopefully more cool research to check out. I didn't mean to sound harsh or ungrateful.

Cheers mates!!!

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