[jefft255]

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.

[minimaxir]

For more context on "very expensive," a MuJoCo license was several hundreds of dollars.

[cyber_kinetist]

For undergrad students trying to dabble in reinforcement learning, several hundreds of dollars can be quite a lot.

[currymj]

the 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.

[GistNoesis]

For reference here is the price before as seen on november 2020 (previous internet archive screenshot), 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

[klowrey]

There 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.

[asah]

+1 - plus, it's an immediate barrier for attracting new people to the field.