Dear users and friends of TURBOMOLE,
it is a great honour for us that Prof. Ahlrichs has transferred the responsibilities for the coordination, support, and marketing of his very efficient and robust quantum chemistry program TURBOMOLE to my company COSMOlogic. COSMOlogic is a small company highly committed to science, with 6 out of its presently 7 employees having PhDs in physical or theoretical chemistry or physics. We always try to combine good science with commercial success, providing high quality scientific software and consulting in combination with professional user support to our academic and industrial user community, and interesting long-term jobs for computational chemists.
Since all the present co-developers of TURBOMOLE have agreed to continue the collaboration under the new arrangement, and since we were able to win Uwe Huniar for our COSMOlogic team in October, we are very optimistic that we will be able to make the transfer to the new situation in a smooth and continuous manner. Furthermore, Prof. Ahlrichs will continue to assist us in his position as scientific supervisor of the TURBOMOLE development for some time. We really want to keep the focus of TURBOMOLE as a highly efficient quantum chemical program for large molecules, and we have the hope that you will assist us by staying active users of TURBOMOLE and by communicating to us your ideas and wishes for the improvement and further development of TURBOMOLE. Even though we will not be able to address all of your wishes, it will be very helpful to know as much as possible about the needs of the user community.
For those TURBOMOLE users who already have a license from COSMOlogic, there will be no immediate changes, and licenses from Karlsuhe remain valid, of course. Under the roof of a commercial company, we will have the chance to care more for user friendliness than it was possible in the academic environment. While no maintenance and support was officially provided for Karlsruhe’s licensees, we will now install an efficient support structure. This necessitates a new licensing scheme, which combines the permanent license with an annual fee for maintenance, upgrades, and support. I am sure that you will understand that this is only possible if everybody pays a modest fee for this additional service, at best by a yearly fee for maintenance, support, and upgrade.
The new arrangements coincide with the release of the new version TURBOMOLE 5.8. Obviously, all users who have a current maintenance, support, and upgrade contract, will get this free of charge within the next weeks. All other users will be contacted by us individually within the next months, or you may contact us actively for getting a quotation for a license of TURBOMOLE 5.8.
Looking forward to a fruitful and enjoyable collaboration
Andreas Klamt
and the COSMOlogic Team
P.S.: Please address all questions which you may have on the new constellation to: turbomole@cosmologic.de