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.

[FTI_Newton]

---

@JackDunaway wrote:

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.

---

You're allowing yourself to be a jerk :P. You assume much. Way too much. A version pared down that far would be of little use to me personally, because I am well past the point of 'hobbyist'.

The point was, and I thought I clearly articulated it, was that you have all the functionality available to learn and develop G code, but without the ability to work in a collaborative environment. That, to my thinking, equates to 'hobbyist use'. If you don't agree with that assessment of hobbyist version, come up with another one and pare down the functionality set to align with it.

If you think a pared down version is a bad idea, I can understand that. But for the sake of argument, lets say NI is going to go ahead and do it over your objections. To fit the definition of 'personal' or 'hobbyist' , what would be the things you think would be reasonable to cut out?

[JackDunaway]

>> You're allowing yourself to be a jerk

Perhaps, I'll tone it down.

>> I am well past the point of 'hobbyist'.

'Hobbyist' does not convey level of skill or capability or breadth/depth of project. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if the pool of recreational programmers are among the most skilled and are interested in using the most advanced features. 

>> The point was, and I thought I clearly articulated it, was that you have all the functionality available to learn and develop G code, but without the ability to work in a collaborative environment. That, to my thinking, equates to 'hobbyist use'.

Are you aware of the winner of the NIWeek 2010 LabVIEW Add-On of the Year? Look it up... this proves that National Instruments publicly values and recognizes community members collaborating on their own dime on their own time.

[JackDunaway]

---

@JackDunaway wrote:

Are you aware of the winner of the NIWeek 2010 LabVIEW Add-On of the Year?

---

I should qualify my question: the winner of the Community Category. Just recently, it seems Jim Kring et al. have been making strides with official NI syndication/acceptance of community-developed freeware. It's an intriguing movement that has piqued my interest, and this Idea goes hand-in-hand with the community collaboration model. Currently, individuals who use LabVIEW licensed by their employers face a possible conflict of interest (be it contractual or conscience) using company resources to develop community tools. A personally owned license lifts this restriction.

[FTI_Newton]

Your definition of 'hobbyist' makes sense. My idea seems more aligned with Student Edition (which I've never seen).

In your scenario, paring it down would be no good to the advanced user. Then again, do we really know who the average hobbyist is? Maybe you are the one guilty of the 80/20 rule. 😉 j/k

Just seems that for personal use, a full-blown professional license is a bit much to swallow, especially when you aren't intending to distribute code. I suppose the Full Version fills that gap. 

BTW, by collaborative environment, I didn't mean people not working together conceptually, I meant strictly within the development environment itself. I envisioned the hobbyist, toiling away in his garage with a laptop and a tangle of wires hooked up to his motorcycle... yep. definitely guilty. 

[jdeguire]

Instead of including the App Builder (which is not cheap and therefore probably won't happen), why not allow users to download a sort of "VI Viewer" application?  Microsoft has a Word Document Viewer and Adobe has the Reader app for PDF files, so this VI Viewer could work in a similar fashion to allow running VIs but not editing them.

You can open up VIs to see their front panels and run them, but you cannot open up the block diagram or any property windows, icon editor, etc.  The Viewer would open up normal .vi files, not executables made with the App Builder.  This also works to reinforce a previously-mentioned idea of the hobby version requiring you to keep your VIs source code open since you would have to distribute all of your sources in order for others to be able to run them in the Viewer.

[altenbach]

> Instead of including the App Builder (which is not cheap and therefore probably won't happen)

I strongly disagree. The development cost of the application builder is already paid and (same as with the hobby version), we are now targeting users that are in all ways orthogonal to the existing paying corporate users and would never buy the product otherwise.

The cost to NI is the cost to download the application which is fractional pennies. The reward is global exposure and adoption of LabVIEW by all interested programmers, from pre-schoolers, to retirees. In the words of the american express commercials, this is priceless. 😄 (Another example: Google is doing well, but when was the last time you actually paid for a Google service?)

Many years ago, we had the LabVIEW player and it was not pretty. (Besides, if the hobby version is free, everybody could just run stuff in the development version).

There needs to be a mechanism to distribute freeware application to users who don't need or want to deal with LabVIEW and don't care what was used to write the program.

Another idea would be to host the application builder on an NI server and the applications would need to be built in the cloud using a web interface. This way NI has more control over potential abusers of the system. Of course this would need extra investment into development and infrastructure.

[jdeguire]

I agree that NI could make the App Builder either free or cheap, I just think that they won't do it.  At least, I don't think we'll see the same App Builder that NI normally charges $1000 for.  I've also so far been assuming that the home version of LabVIEW would still cost money (I figured $150-$200).  Maybe I'm just too cynical. =P

The VI Viewer idea allows us to distribute our apps while allowing NI to still sell the App Builder.  The advantage for businesses buying the App Builder is that it creates a single executable (instead of having to bundle up all of our VIs and send those out).  It seems like users of our app still have to go download the Run-Time Engine, so maybe the Viewer could be downloaded with that?  Just out of curiosity, what was wrong with the LabVIEW Player?  I've never heard of it until now.

I actually like the web-based builder idea better, but I thought I'd throw something else out there in case NI is hesistant to go that route.

Edit:  I just looked up that LabVIEW Player and I can see why it's no longer around.  It looks like it was completely neutered and had to run VIs in a web browser.  I figured that any Viewer app should run VIs exactly as they'd run in the development environment.

[RnDMonkey]

I think that those who don't care about using the software legitimately will obtain the most full-featured product by illegitimate means. It's always been my opinion that the best thing you can do for any product is to make it the easiest option for the greatest number of people so that it has the largest user base. Get LabVIEW into students' hands. Get LabVIEW into hobbyists' hands. Get LabVIEW into unemployed electronics technicians' hands. The more people that have LabVIEW expertise, the greater LabVIEW's market share will be. Much like a drug dealer might give you your first "taste" for free, NI should remove barriers to entry so that it is easy for people to "get hooked" on their product.

Some people jealously guard their knowledge and might like that the LabVIEW community is so exclusive, but my father always says that the best way to get better at something is to try to help others get better at it. I suppose I may tend toward idealism but I do think that a larger community only does us all better in the long run.

I absolutely agree that a personal license should be pro-featured and economically - if not freely - accessible to anybody who wants to learn G programming. It also agree that anything developed with such a license should be open-source and unable to be protected from others, as this is in keeping with the spirit of open-source.

[PJC]

Not realizing this topic existed I submitted a duplicate in the new ideas section. Having now waded through the contributions I realize that my own "LE" version would be heavily pruned and of interest only to those who wish to log, display and manipulate basic data in real time. My application is home automation, alt energy logging etc and there is a big market out there which devices such as Ardunio are starting to service. Signal Express LE comes close but there are no real time actions available so everything has to be post processed, not much use.

Like many others I am now retired but frustrated that I no longer have access to LV. Even simple tasks will now require new software and another learning curve. My last employer qualified for the educational version but of course that is no longer applicable to me. That in itself could also be a lifeline as it would be great to receive LV educational version by way of previous association !. To be honest I could have copied the software and used the site licence code - but I did not.

I note this topic has been running for 6 months, are we any closer to getting a consumer version ?

[rex1030]

Artists that leak their hit song for free go platinum faster and sell a lot more records than artists that don't. Its simple. You lower the cost of something and demand increases. More people will use LabVIEW worldwide than ever before. How many millions of dollars a year does NI spend on marketing? What would expose the more people to LabVIEW more than making LabVIEW free? These people will want NI hardware. They will want the great toolkits.

The cost of LabVIEW and NI Hardware is so high it is simply out of reach for 98% percent of the population. When is the last time any of you have spent more than $200 on any program for your home PC? You can get Windows 7 for that much. 

I don't know if NI could afford to give any version of the LabVIEW environment away for free, like NetBeans does for Java (one of the most widely used coding environments ever), but why not offer a decently functional version of labview for like $50 or $100 dollars.

LabVIEW's versatilty is ever increasing but it's not as widely used as other programming environments because of the price. I can get Microsoft's .NET coding environment for free off of download.com but I would have to pay for useful libraries from private companies. I can download Java's best coding environments for free and get more libraries and functionality than I could ever use for free.

If I want a fully-functioning LabVIEW with all the "toolkits" for my house I would have to sell my car to pay for it.

I would never download or use illegal software, but I think I am the only one of my friends who can say that. If NI thinks people aren't sharing hacked copies of LabVIEW they are deluding themselves. Its happening anyways, why not make it legal and easy for anyone to use labview?

Heck, if you don't think that will work just give away every outdated version of LabVIEW and sell the latest one. Just try it and watch the magic happen.

It's time for LabVIEW to go platinum. Give it away, sell the hardware and the special toolkits. Go big or go home.