Important announcement: academic license changes

Over 6 years ago, we released version 2.0 of CVX, enabling its use with commercial solvers Gurobi and MOSEK. These solvers make CVX significantly more powerful. We decided to make this a closed-source add-on so that we could fund CVX development and support through the sale of licenses to commercial entities.

Of course, we are fully committed to offering academic users full functionality at no charge, so we built a semi-automated academic license generator. Unfortunately, the support burden required to maintain this generator is no longer sustainable. For this reason, we are making the following changes, effective immediately.

Starting with build 1127 of CVX 2.1—released in December, 2018—you no longer need a CVX Academic license to use CVX with Gurobi or MOSEK. Full interoperability has been unlocked for these solvers as long as you have a valid license, properly installed, from the vendors themselves:

• Gurobi: http://www.gurobi.com/academia/for-universities
• MOSEK: https://www.mosek.com/products/academic-licenses/

Make sure that you follow the full instructions for each solver for obtaining the license and installing it in the proper location.

Some additional notes:

• The existing license generator is not being disabled. As long as it works for you, you are free to use it. However, its database of valid academic institutions will no longer be updated, and we can offer no support for issues related to academic CVX licenses.
• Academic cluster administrators: the change in our approach is actually good news, because now you can install CVX across your cluster with full Gurobi and MOSEK support. Simply make sure that their licenses are properly installed; and, if you install a new version of Gurobi or MOSEK, make sure it is included in your MATLAB path. Enabling this use case was a key reason why we made this change.
• Commercial users: a CVX Professional license is still required to use CVX with a commercial solver in non-academic settings. Please contact sales@cvxr.com for more information. Our special “CVX-locked” licenses for Gurobi and MOSEK are significantly more cost-effective than full solver licenses, if you only intend to use them with CVX.

The first publicly available version of CVX was released in 2005—over 13 years ago.  We had no idea that it would prove so useful to so many. Thank you to everyone through the years for using it, for citing it, and for offering us encouragement!