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This is really good news. It was a really contentious issue in RL and robotics research to be so reliant on proprietary (and very expensive) software.
by jefft255 5y ago
This is really good news. It was a really contentious issue in RL and robotics research to be so reliant on proprietary (and very expensive) software.
- asah 5y ago+1 - plus, it's an immediate barrier for attracting new people to the field.
- minimaxir 5y agoFor more context on "very expensive," a MuJoCo license was several hundreds of dollars.
- GistNoesis 5y agoFor reference here is the price before as seen on november 2020 (previous internet archive screenshot), https://web.archive.org/web/20201111235930/https://www.roboti.us/license.html https://web.archive.org/web/20201111235930/https://www.robot... TLDR: personal non commercial 500$/year for usage on up to 3 computers personal commercial 2000$/year
- currymj 5y agothe price was reasonable for a good piece of software, but for the way people want to do ML research now (launch tons of parallel jobs on lots of cloud machines) the price, and more importantly, the burden of managing licenses, was prohibitive.
- cyber_kinetist 5y agoFor undergrad students trying to dabble in reinforcement learning, several hundreds of dollars can be quite a lot.
- ladberg 5y agoI got MuJoCo for free as an undergrad and I'm pretty sure all I needed was a .edu email address.
- xwolfi 5y agoBut they can accept that the world is not geared towards amateur dabblers, and that a few hundreds of $ for a license (a license, meaning to legalize production usage, you can always copy from somewhere to "dabble") is nothing.
- ResearchCode 5y agoThe CS world has certainly been geared towards the hobbyist budget for some time now. Would be good to keep it that way, even if it meant sacrificing a supposed 1% extra accuracy in the latest "top conference" (sure if their sponsors are the companies publishing huge models it won't happen even if it should).
- Syntonicles 5y agoWell now they don't have to, because it really is nothing.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dekhn 5y agoas an undergrad in the 90s I invested thousands of dollars of my own money to work on machine learning. Worth every penny, even if I had to miss out on some cool parties.
- regularfry 5y agoWonderful that you had thousands of dollars as an undergrad to be able to do so.
- NikolaeVarius 5y agoWorking in undergrad isn't a common thing?
- cdcarter 5y agoWell, if you're working to pay your rent, bills, and food expenses, and you're only working part time (because you're a full time undergraduate student), you may not have a lot left over to pay for software licenses.
- dekhn 5y agowhich is precisely the reason I went with linux: so I could maximize my hardware resources while eliminating license costs. By not buying whatever MS compiler in those days, I was able to max out my workstation with 32MB RAM.
- regularfry 5y agoWorking in undergrad and having thousands left over after paying for food and a place to sleep certainly can't be assumed to be. That's where my pay went.
- dekhn 5y agoI was very fortunate to not have to pay tuition or board, but if I had to, I wouldn't have spent my money to pay for that (I would have taken out loans) and still spent my money on RAM.
- klowrey 5y agoThere was a free license for individual users, with the non-free license applicable to those who were receiving financial support (i.e. academic / industry researchers, etc.). The individual license was very popular and heavily utilized.