Sostieni Barry MacKichan

Scientific Word is a favorite program for writing mathematics documents. It is now free, but some infrastructure is needed to provide free license files. Coffee contributions can help maintain this.

When you activate a Scientific Word license on your computer, that license will work indefinitely on that computer (or virtual machine). However, when to move your copy of Scientific Word to another computer, you will need to reactivate the program there. Thus it is important that the licensing server that does this (located at licensing.mackichan.com) continue running indefinitely. The following have been done to make sure that this happens for the foreseeable future.

1. The server runs on an Ubuntu instance in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.
2. The program is a node.js program running under the pm2 process manager so that it is restarted in the case of a crash or a reboot of the instance.
3. There is a backup of the program in the form of an Amazon AMI that contains the program and the essential data so that a new instance can be spun up in minutes. The source of the program is in a Git repository residing on a dormant machine in AWS.
4. The information and private key files necessary to modify the setup are documented and duplicated.
5. The SSL certificate necessary for the https protocol is from LetsEncrypt and auto-renews reliably.

The conditions necessary for this to continue are:

1. The AWS must be paid monthly for charges for running the server instance, storing backups, dormant instances, and IP connections.
2. The domain mackichan.com needs to be maintained, and the email address [email protected] needs the privilege of sending email.
3. The DNS connection that connects the URL licensing.mackichan.com to the AWS instance needs to continue.
4. The storage for programs and manuals, the target of the links on mackichan,com generates a recurring charge.

If you would like to contribute a modest amount to continue this infrastructure, and more importantly to continue it when I am no longer able to, you can contribute here.