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.

[JackDunaway]

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Ray.R wrote:

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.

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I would be reluctant to cough up a recurring fee. Some people would want the "latest and greatest".... but if I noticed it was a release year where LabVIEW toolkits proliferated but the base package didn't change much, I would skip buying the new IDE for that year.

Also, I would not want to pay for support for this license! The forums are rich enough support. As stated in the original idea: Support would be limited to community support - I agree with this.

[Ray.R]

I totally agree with the support idea which is limited to the forum.  

Maybe the term "license" is incorrect.  I was thinking of something more in line with a yearly rental fee. Of course, that concept is probably foreign to hobbiests and would not be well accepted.  I was simply thinking in the lines of "what would cause NI to want to do this?  it has to be a lucrative reason for NI"..

[JackDunaway]

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Ray.R wrote:

"what would cause NI to want to do this?  it has to be a lucrative reason for NI"....

---

You bring up a very good point: so far, we have suggested MANY different "strings attached" that are either acceptable or deal-breakers. It would be beneficial for someone at NI to create a survey (Google Docs or something...), and have people rank them from "acceptable" to "despicable". I would like to see the results public, because I am curious what other community members want in this license also.

This would provide a clear matrix of what is important to the 110+ people who have Kudoe'd this Idea compared to the "strings" that are important to the decision makers NI.

Here's a list of all the "strings" we've been trying to impose upon ourselves so far:

1. No Customer Support (only Community Support)

2. Advertising/product placement on About screen or Splash Screen

3. No Application Builder

4. Run-time EXE's only function on computers where the Home Edition is installed (i.e., the Home Edition doubles as the RTE).

5. Require activation and registration licenses

6. Must pass a training class or the CLAD to receive a Home Edition

7. Must fill out marketing questionnaire during registration

8. Anonymous usage statistics of the IDE

9. Watermarks on all applications

10. All built applications must be open source by including the source code in the EXE (and no password protection or removing BD's)

11. License may be revoked by NI for abusing privileges

12. Requiring internet connection to use the IDE

13. Requiring internet connection to build applications

14. "Pared down" version excluding things like Advanced Math, Networking, LabVIEW Projects.... you name it

15. Limit VI server functionality

16. Limit on number of cores or processing utilization

17. Limiting BD's to a maximum screen resolution

18. Small fee to purchase ($99 to $149 or so)

19. Online app builder

20. Limiting the size (bytes or nodes) of a project or VI

21. No "Customizing Controls"

22. Requring a recurring fee license rather than a one-time (or no) fee

Message Edited by JackDunaway on 04-13-2010 01:07 PM

[altenbach]

What if it were only available bundled with a LabVIEW related book or piece of hardware? We already have the student edition textbook bundle, which is about the price of a typical text book. (In other words, the SE is already "free" in this context). The main problem is the restriction to education.

NI has been know to give away Student editions at certain LabVIEW events at universities. A couple of years ago, everybody attending NI week with the academic discount got a Student edition CD.

Any publisher (e.g. LabVIEW for Everyone) should be able to bundle the LabVIEW personal edition with their LabVIEW related book to get everybody started. If we want to upgrade after a year to the new version, we can either buy another book or sign up for "Personal SSP" maintenance. Alternatively, we can keep using the old version forever.

I would probably be willing to pay about the same as a typical magazine subscription (e.g. $15) for an annual maintenance. (It needs to be significantly cheaper than a new book!). There would be no shipped CDs. Download only. Community support only. E-mailed monthly newsletter, perhaps.

We need a special "Personal Edition" community here. NI could sponsor participation with contest (e.g. Top home application gets a free NI week pass, LabVIEW sticker giveaways, win a LabVIEW t-shirt, etc.).

[muks]

>>No "Customizing Controls"

 How is this going to be helpful?

[Ray.R]

That's a fantastic idea.  Bundled with a book, just like the SE.

Brilliant.

[NimbleThink]

Two comments:

It might be nice to be able to compile a LV program targeted to a microcontroller, probably nothing as complex as an ARM but some of the small & cheap microcontrollers out there.  This would be along the lines of using LV to program home automation: develop a module, compile it and install on a microcontroller which you wire into a wall switch...

So a hobbyist version might benefit from including LabVIEW RT or Embedded SDK or some similar functionality.

Instead of waiting for a hobbyist version, why not sign up for a community college class, get your student ID card, then purchase Student Edition?

[altenbach]

The student edition does not include embedded. 

[jdeguire]

Well, someone mentioned the idea of being able to buy additional add-ons to the Personal Edition.  If you want the microcontroller compilers, FPGA stuff, math libraries, Application Builder, and so on, then you can buy them after you purchase the base IDE.  Of course, the prices of these would also need to be affordable to the hobbyist.  This would also have the potentional to increase sales since you could buy the base IDE now and get the FPGA package you want later when you can afford it.

I also think that the price should be a one-time deal.  You get 20xx now and if you want 20xx++, then you buy it again.  Packaging it with a textbook is a good idea.

[10Degree]

I would not hobble the original idea that altenbach presented too much by trying to kludge on additional requirements, constraints, or controls.  I don't think NI would go for this concept at all if it meant loosing sales of the real deal, or committing additional development resources to make some alternate build version of LabVIEW that would perform with some of the above proposed controls and constraints.  Microsoft is already taking advantage of this "hobbyist" model by releasing "Express" editions of Visual Basic, C++, C#, SQL Server, and some other products.  These are nearly full-blast versions of their Visual Studio counterparts with minimal "hobbling" and are marketed to hobbyists.  You can even create exe's installers and sell your works.  I would be in favor of a hobbyist path that gives one access to the full tools with minimal constraints.  When hobbies become professions, buy the full tools.