Originally, Amira was designed and developed by the Department of Visual Data Analysis at ZIB. It is now commercially developed and distributed under the product names Amira and Avizo by FEI SAS, a part of Thermo Fisher Scientific. Details about the history of Amira can be found in this Wikipedia article.
Amira remains the development platform for many research projects at the Department of Visual Data Analysis at ZIB. For this purpose, ZIB maintains a version of Amira for Research Partners. Research partners are individuals who actively participate in a joint research project with ZIB aiming at joint publications, joint software development, and/or joint funding. ZIB can provide Amira for Research Partners for the duration of the project on an individual basis free of charge.