Noncommercial Hobby/Home license for LabVIEW

[altenbach]

It has come up in discusssions that NI does not really cater to hobbyists. A cheap and functional version of LabVIEW is limited to the student edition, which is restricted to a small subset of potential users.

 From the  FAQ:

"The LabVIEW Student Edition is available to students, faculty, and staff for personal educational use only. It is not intended for research or institutional use."

As a suggested first step, I suggest to remove the academia restriction and mold it into a new product:

--- LabVIEW personal edition ---

Licensed as follows:

"The LabVIEW Personal Edition is for personal use only. It is not intended for commercial, research or institutional use."

 It would be available to anyone for noncommercial home use.

LabVIEW currently has the home use exemption that allows installing a copy at home. Unfortunately, if you lose your job, you not only lose your health insurance, but you also lose access to LabVIEW, thus hampering any self paced LabVIEW tinkering that possibly would improve future job prospects. I am sure many retired LabVIEW engineers would love some recreational LabVIEW use. They could be a great asset, because they will have more time helping out in the community and forums. They could even give guest presentations at user group meetings, for example.

The LabVIEW personal edition should include all modules of interest to the hobbyist, including application builder, embedded, FPGA, and robotics.  We should be able to distribute built applications as freeware. Support would be limited to community support.

Installing LabVIEW on every single private home computer in the world would cost NI exactly nothing (except for some sales of the current student edition which is about the price of a textbook, some internet bandwidth, and loss of the zero to two (?) multi-millionaires who actually bought the NI developer suite for themselves. ;)). 99.9% of users would never touch it, but that 0.1% could come up with great new application areas and would help spread the word on how great LabVIEW really is. Soon 0.2% would use it. 🙂

It should follow the "customer class limited" Freemium model, (as defined by Chris Anderson), i.e. limited to personal home use in this case.

The running applications should be clearly identified to prevent commercial use. The splash screen and "about" screen should prominently display the words LabVIEW and National Instruments and could even be used for NI advertising and product placements, for example.

[Henrik_Volkers]

It would be great 😄 😄

Also like the idea of the open source ... but have a bad feeling about anonymous usage statistics. (... leave a checkbox in the options to turn it OFF, just to give me the 'impression' that I can have some control over my data 😉  But wait... using Windows...hopeless ....)

[Intaris]

I too like the idea of not being able to protect or remove diagrams.

That alone would scupper many "commercial" applications. 

Shane

Message Edited by Intaris on 04-07-2010 04:47 AM

[muks]

>>- The app builder could be an online utility. Control of app building could be controlled a little better that way.

Even better.I agree.

[jmorris]

To agree with some of the above statements, I would absolutely be willing to pay a reasonable amount (certainly up to $100, perhaps up to $200) for a home license that is full-featured.

I also agree with Jack Dunaway in that everyone's discard list is going to be different, so trying to limit features would be extremely tricky.

I also agree that I would be very willing to put up with non-functional annoyances such as splash screens if it allowed something otherwise not available (such as App Builder), or reduced the cost of the software.

Here's to hoping!  🙂 

[JackDunaway]

I am ambivalent about an online app builder. In theory, it would be able to do everything the desktop application is capable of, but I could see how limits would need to be established for technical reasons. How many MB's can you upload? Is there a limit to the number of project items (and thus, would people just create larger BD's with fewer typedefs?)? How do we select which files to use in the upload (e.g., dependencies scattered across your hard drive)? How much server CPU are we allowed? Are we limited to N number of builds per day/week? Does the build have to be approved by an actual employee, or is it automatically generated by the machine?

In my experience, building an exe is an iterative process for the first builds on a new project. Build.... change build spec.... build again.... change a little code.... build again.... change top level window attributes.... build again.... and virtually all hobbyist projects would be "new projects". An online app builder with limitations could make this process tedious.

An online app builder could provide NI with more control over the build process, but it also creates a maintenance and cost headache for them. It also has the potential of being inconvenient for the end-user. That being said, I really prefer a desktop app builder.

Here's a concession: the personal computer must be connected to the internet to request build credentials/permission from an NI server. This would include all the benefits for everyone: offloading the need for server infrastructure hosted by NI, and the snappy response of a desktop build for us. Plus, app builder statistics could still be accurately controlled and monitored by NI.

[tst]

Requiring a web connection is evil. I want to be able to fully use the product I have regardless of whether or not I'm connected to the web. If this info is something that NI will want (and I have no idea if it is) they could have it as a mandatory/opt in/opt out feature which will not prevent the build in cases where it can't function.

[Intaris]

I agree.  Requiring a web connection to build applications will annoy people.

[F._Schubert]

I really try to think the marketing way. At least it will give me more job-opportunities in the future if LV becomes more widespread.

A real no-no would be anything that Joe Average programmer could say: LabView isn't a real programming language. So I woul really want to have Events, OOP and everything any other language offers you (yes, it needs the App Builder!). So on the downturn, nobody would miss advanced analysis for the hobby (though I wouldn't like to work without it). And everything will be still fine if you don't have a cool Icon editor (actually, you can program with stupid standard icon's, but I wouldn't like to do it, and you can't sell drivers without some kind of icon).

Even more, you could  place a bit of aggressiv marketing in the hobby license by:

a) force everyone to get the runtime engine (like Sun/Java or MS/.NET)

b) get the people used to LV look (I can live with no 'customize control' and no 'dialog controls')

Felix

[Marc Blumentritt]

I very much like the idea of "forcing" open source by removing the possibility to hide anything. As far as I now, a standard LabVIEW app is more or less a container file for VIs, removing during the build process unneeded stuff (like the mentioned block diagrams). Why not modify the application builder to not remove anything from the code and give a simple method to "open" the container, therefore allowing to look inside the app? It also gives you another (small?) reason to buy the professional version, because it can create smaller and better optimized executables.

[Ray.R]

That's a good idea Altenbach.

They could also consider having a hobby yearly license.  Let's say $100 - $200 per year but that would also give you access to the latest version.