Licensing

2024/04/21 update: effective immediately, CVX is free to use for all purposes, including commercial, without a license. Please see this announcement for more details.

CVX is free for use in academic commercial settings when paired with a free solver—that is, a solver that is available free of charge to all users, academic and commercial. CVX currently ships with SeDuMi and SDPT3. We plan plan to add connections to other free solvers in the future.

Starting with version 2.0, we have begun to connect CVX to well-respected commercial solvers as well, beginning with Gurobi and Mosek. This new capability has been released under a CVX Professional product tier, which we we offer to commercial users for a fee.

Academic users

Active students, faculty, and staff of degree-granting academic institutions may obtain a CVX Professional license key at no charge. Academic keys may only be used for educational and research purposes; no commercial use is permitted. To obtain an academic license, please visit the Academic licensing page.

Commercial users

Commercial use of CVX with non-free solvers requires a CVX Professional license. We offer a standalone version of CVX Professional that can be paired with existing installations of Gurobi or MOSEK, as well as packages that include a CVX-specific license for one or more solvers.

Licenses are offered on a subscription basis: a fixed fee per seat, per year. Pricing information is available here. Please contact CVX Research for a quote.

Copyright and license information

The bulk of CVX remains open source under the terms of the CVX Standard License. This license is actually nothing more than the GNU General Public License, Version 3, with a single added permission: the ability to modify CX to connect it to any fully free solver, even if that solver’s license is not otherwise compatible with the GPLv3.

A small number of files that support the CVX Professional functionality remain closed source. Those files are not redistributable without the advance permission of the owners. However, those files may be removed without compromising the functionality of CVX with free solvers, including SeDuMi and SDPT3.

For more details, please see the full License section of the users’ guide.