First of all, thankyou to everyone for the support during the development of Risk Engine to date. It really is much appreciated and is a huge help to further the development.

Unfortunately support from donations, or other similar sources have been somewhat limited. Developing and supporting an application does cost money and to date donations have not covered these costs. I really want Risk Engine to pay for itself as there is much more work that I want to do to create a leading example of an analysis application.

To try and deal with this problem I have a few possible solutions. One is to open source the application and see if the community can push it forward. Although I'm an advocate and user of open source software, I'm not sure that open source is right for Risk Engine. It is a specialist piece of software and so the number of users who might want to work on the development will be somewhat limited compared with other projects such as Adium.

After some thought, I've decided the best route for me to take is to release Risk Engine as a paid for application. The next release of Risk Engine will therefore be a 1.0 release and the software will become a paid for application. This will hopefully allow me to drive towards some of my aspirations for Risk Engine. It will also enable me to put support in place that a professional level application deserves.

This doesn't help me achieve all my aspirations for Risk Engine though. I wanted to create an application that was simple enough to use and accessible enough that everyone can play around and learn from Monte Carlo analysis. These are techniques that need to be used rather than taught, and they need to be used in a creative and experimental manner to get the best from them. I am therefore going to have a tiered pricing system of:

• Normal license of $40
• Academic license of $10

The academic license will therefore be accessible to anyone who is undertaking academic work. If you are a student or a teacher in school, college or university and would like an academic license then just get in touch and I will arrange for one. I'm also opening up the academic license to anyone who is engaged in work that will become open source as I really do believe that you don't have to be in an academic institution to be either a student or a researcher. Anyone who is undertaking some sort of learning programme, even if it is a programme you made yourself, should therefore be eligible or an academic license. Similarly, if you are engaged in research work, as long as your research will become public domain at some point in time, you will be eligible for an academic license so please get in touch for a license.

I want everyone who buys a license to be happy with the purchase, so to enable this I'm going to introduce a limited functionality demo. This means that everyone who is interested in Risk Engine can have a look and trial the software prior to purchase to make sure they will be happy with the purchase. I'm limiting functionality, rather than have a time limited trial, because I believe that if you create a model in Risk Engine, that is your model and you should always be able to access your data. A time limited trial doesn't do that because if you create your model and want to access it after the time limit is up, you'll have to buy a full license. For this application, I feel that the fairest way of creating a trial application is to limit the functionality rather than having a time limited trial. If you do need a fully functional, time limited trial then please get in touch and I will make suitable arrangements.

Finally, if I am going to charge for Risk Engine, I want to be able to give something back to the community. For this reason 25% of every purchase will go towards The Dogs Trust and SARAID, two UK based charities. In the interests of full disclosure, I am an operational team member in SARAID but I have no affiliations to The Dogs Trust.

The last thing I need to do is to give you some idea for where the future of Risk Engine lies. There are many minor changes and improvements I have planned for Risk Engine to make it a more useable and attractive application to use. In addition to these, I would also like to add some major functionality improvements, including:

• The ability to solve linear and non-linear optimisation problems for Monte Carlo and other models.
• Regression of the final outputs from the model to give best fit probability distributions.
• The ability to take 'snapshots' of spreadsheet models and run and store multiple analyses.
• Adding spreadsheet templates to the model.
• Adding evidence based probability distributions and tools to check input models against actual out-turn results.
• Localised versions of Risk Engine (thanks to Olivier De Smet who has already provided me with some useful feedback on this particular issue).

My aim is to make Risk Engine a leader in usable and practical analysis tools. All of these improvements are planned for the 1.0 release and so will all be accessible to license holders as soon as they are implemented in Risk Engine. Of course, if you have anything you would like me to look at for the future please get in touch.

Thankyou to everyone who has provided feedback to date. I hope that the future versions of Risk Engine live up to your expectations.

Tags: Risk Engine