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.

[RandyP]

One problem I see with "license could be revoked by NI".

I would cringe at the idea of this software requiring you to be connected to the web for use, like some video games nowadays.  I guess that might be an acceptable price to pay (in freedom), but again, I would cringe.

[tsteel]

Just adding another +1 to this!  Whilst I also have access to LabView via an employer, I am not willing to start using it for personal as I dont want to become dependant on software that I may not have forever.  I personally would prefer the ability to create executable files, but have no objection to splash screens and other visual annoyances in return for preferably free (or cheap) access to LabView. 

Also, I am of the opinion that some of the modules must be included in this.  I personally am in favour of the FPGA module, especially as it supports the Spartan 3E board!

Just my $0.02, but this would awesome to have!

[LuI]

Fully agree with Altenbach!

IMHO such personal edition would need:

* Events

* AppBuilder (might include some limitations like splash screen, advertising etc.)

* some basic DAQ- and device driver functionality including some basic version of VISA

* a means to keep code created in fully featured LV versions functional, maybe as blackboxed part of code (so let me work on job tasks at home if I would like and are allowed without the need to have two different versions of LabVIEW installed at home)

* external code usage

I could easily live without advanced math, most toolkits, DIAdem, Signal Express, Mathlab-connections and environment variables.

I would miss reporting tools, XML, TDMS and web functions.

In my personal situation I can not imagine to maintain my LabVIEW knowledge and usage if I would lose my currenbt job. No way I could effort buying a full version of LabVIEW, not to speak about justifying this to my family. Instead I probably would switch to devellopment management (SCRUM MASTERING & QM) as is part of my current job anyhow...

Greetings from Germany!

[muks]

By JackDunaway

---

muks wrote:

giving an application builder might not be possible due to potential abuse

---

Strongly disagree with this statement. The knuckleheads that would abuse the license are probably the same knuckleheads who would try to pirate a copy anyway. They still get the application builder either way - the ones who lose are those who abide by the Terms. Offering a full-fledged Application Builder in LabVIEW Home Edition coupled with a statically linked small RTE could be a dream come true for both the hobbyist and NI marketing.

---

 How about buying one office licence and multiple home editions and working with a team of size 15??? There is huge possibility right. Atleastdisabling creating an exe or some kinda annoyance can make sure this doesnt eat into the regular's market share..Just a precaution.

[Intaris]

We need to differentiate between "free" and "professional" code...

Both could be of the same quality, capable of exploiting LV to the same degree.  There is no inherent difference in complexity to be expected between professionally developed code and code deveoped on a hobby project.  To claim different is to undermine the target audience of this exercise IMO.

What are the essentials for good code?

Events, Synchronisation, TCPIP, USB, Serial, Disk I/O, DAQ

What can be discarded?

LVOOP (Not sure about this one), XControls, .NET, Datasocket, Shared Variables, Timed structures, Stacked sequences ;), Web services, 3D picture control, Projects and Conditional disable

Maybe severely limiting the access to VI server from within the IDE would help incentivise a professional version?  Or maybe we could limit LV to only two cores of the processor?  Otherwise a watermark could be a good idea....

Just my current thoughts.

Shane

[JackDunaway]

Shane, the only thing in your discard list I agree with is Stacked Sequences! (Projects are not essential for good code?) (I agree that if we have TCP/IP functions, then we "have" Datasocket and Web Services... that is, the 2% of LabVIEW users who know a ton about network protocols and have a lot of free time.)

Everyone's list of "discards" is going to be different. Take a look at Spolsky's 80/20 Myth. It's probably true that 80% of LabVIEW users could get by with only 20% of the features of LabVIEW, but it's impossible that everyone's 20% is the same set of features. By the time you have included everyone's 20%, you end up with the full-featured package again.

Here's a big "what-if" to consider: what if this "Home Version" costed $99 or $149 or so? And toolkits could be purchased for $49 or $79 or so? I would MUCH rather pay those prices for the full-featured version rather than get so-and-so's 20% version for free. This reduced-price home version would still have the limitations (cannot sell developed products, open-source, maybe some advertising, usage statistics...).

[Intaris]

Jack,

Just thought I'd throw the stacked sequence in there for giggles.  I was tempted to write "Local variables" too, but that's going a bit too far...... even for me.

And sure, some code can be written without projects.  I know people with full licenses and don't use projects.  I use them, I see the benefits but many don't use them.

[altenbach]

Let me iterate my comments on forcing open source. So far I talked about built applications, but the same should be true for VIs.

The personal edition should restrict the following features:

(1) We cannot remove the diagram of a VI.

(2) We cannot password protect the block diagram of VIs.

(As well a similar settings for libraries, etc.) 

In a built application, we cannot customize the "about" dialog. The menu of the toplevel is always visible and contains at least the about entry. (If we want, we can add a second menu item: "About MyApp...". The stock about should be clear about the purpose and use restriction of the personal edition)

Message Edited by altenbach on 04-06-2010 09:33 AM

[RobCole]

A few thoughts have gone through my head with this one. Just some possibilities.

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

 - A home edition might limit the size of a project. Our work projects here have literally thousands (yes, plural) of VIs. I know that limiting the number of VIs might encourage poor programming (how many screens does that block diagram cover?), but maybe the number of nodes in a project would be a better indication.

- Possibly screen size limited as well (force more structured diagrams...) One of my thoughts on limiting screen size is that once hobbyists get this into their hands - how many will read a style guide? And will we see a huge increase in the "Abuse of Locals" and "Rube Glodberg" message threads?

     Rob

[GWJ]

Excellent idea. Can't tell you how many times I've wanted to distribute hobby-related applications to my user community (amateur radio). Plenty of guys I talk with say they have heard of LV and would like to use it, given an affordable way.  I'd agree that various "annoyances" should be tolerable as long as it's full-featured and at reasonable cost.