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.

[tst]

It looks like the upgrade broke the old links. The vote was from Jeff K.

[kdmcmullan]

How about if the home use version was a a few versions behind the commercial product? Sure LabVIEW 2009 has some lovely features, but I'd be happy with version 7 for free! Of course I wouldn't expect any support from NI for a product that old.

To answer a point made earlier in this thread: I'd actually prefer if all the fancy maths were left out of a home edition. I almost always end up developing my own because it's a lot quicker than trying to figure out the LabVIEW way!

[tst]

Having it as an old version would create support issues (saving files back and forth, bugs which were fixed in later versions, features which were introduced in later versions), would make it more difficult for NI to build ("you mean I need to get the computer with XP and VS 6 which we used to build LV 7?") and would miss some of the point, because it would tend to look out of date, thus making NI look bad.

It should be a lot simpler for NI to do this using a modern version with the already existing licensing mechanism.

[kdmcmullan]

We have seen multiple examples of folk using LabVIEW in work and home who would be afraid to lose their home licence if they changed jobs.

It was alluded to in the very first response that there was the possibility of a hobbiest version of LabVIEW leading to the purchase of a professional version (a la Eagle CAD) as a company takes off.

Consideration should also be given to the supplimentary scenario where someone is using a hobbiest version of LabVIEW at home, simply because it's free, but they realise its potential to help with a task in the workplace, suggests it to an employer and hey presto: even more business for NI.

[FTI_Newton]

Home edition would be great, but I don't think it would serve NI to make the home version anything but extrememly limited. If it's purpose is to allow the home tinkerer to play around, I would not be upset if they made the following restrictions:

1 seat license - only install on ONE computer.

No Application Builder. 

No Web Server

No Shared Variable Engine

No Express VIs

No Source Control

VI Server access to local machine only

I do think they should leave in LVOOP and event programming.

I think this gives a fair balance for the needs of personal use as a hobbyist tool and for learning LabVIEW,

but with the kinds of restrictions that make LabIVEW useful in a collaborative work environment and in distributed applications.

Also, I don't think it should be free at all. It's a useful tool; pay for it.

[JackDunaway]

I'm not timid about voicing my opinion again and again against how disappointing it would be to get a significantly pared-down version for hobby use. I'll take the liberty of rephrasing your quote more accurately:

---

@FTI Newton wrote:

I think this gives a fair balance for the needs of personal use of FTI Newton

---

You're allowing yourself to be duped by the 80/20 myth.

[Intaris]

I think doing away with the application builder would only be feasible if the hobby environment was smaller or similar in size to the run-time that would otherwise be required.  This seems unlikely.

[AndrewCapon]

Another vote for some form of home edition for non commercial use.

[Randy_Lloyd]

I think the home/hobby/not-for-profit license is a good concept. I don't know NI's internal financial/marketing scheme for LabVIEW, but it seems unlikely that the proposed hobby version (including the notifier/splash of any subsequent executable built) would be financially viable.

My opinion is a price point of $99 is great for selling it but probably not acceptable to NI. NI might buy in at $199 to $249 (realistic max for hobby users I think), but would probably cut the number of units sold by way more than the price increase compensates for (maybe 10% sales at $249 vs 100% relative at $99, so more net income at $99, at only the cost of bandwidth for additional downloads.

I'll be in line for a hobby copy for home tinkering and skill -sharpening at $99 for certain. I'd have to think on it a bit at $149 or higher (personal opinion for my circumstance).

FYI - I've been using LV since v.3.0 windows, with biggest usage in the 5.1 to 6.0 era. Not much the last 5 yrs or so, but still occasionally).

Randy

Idaho Falls, ID

[Marc_A]

While I would love to see this, I do see a pretty big problem. At my old job, we used LabVIEW for internal software only. What would stop a company like that from using the personal version? Many companies that pay for the software and SSP to develop software for their own systems could simply use the personal version if it was fully featured with only a nag screen. There needs to be a way to distinguish between these companies and hobbyists, or else NI will definitely lose money by doing this.