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.

[10Degree]

Message Edited by 10Degree on 04-20-2010 10:11 AM

[ST5]

Please full-full featured, and compatible with the "expensive" one.

RT, Fpga, Vision,...

Popups/Watermark/... are no problem, as long as experience can be shared.

I learned LV with an illegal copy of LV6 at home. It took me some weeks, spread over some years.

Where I work now they pay the full version for me.

I would never have payed for it in the beginning, or tried it out for 3 months.

.

[BruceBowler]

Started using LV at V3.mumble.  The last upgrade I was able to convince the boss to spend money on was {gasp} 5.01.

I want to keep my skills up to date but certainly won't buy myself a license...

A couple of packages I'm familiar with offer *full featured* hobbyist versions of there software for free or the cost of the media.

1) silverfrost fortran compiler, $675 for a commercial license, free for personal use.  

    - nag screen, forum support only, free release lags paid release by a few months

2) the VMS operating system and tools, $10,000's to buy it all, free for hobbyist use.

    - license expires after one year (but easily renewable), requires appropriate (specialized) hardware, no nags,  must get the media (but I think you can borrow it from a friend).  Forum support only.

Just my $0.03 (inflation, you know)

[hecmar.arreola]

I am fortunate enough to have my company pay for my licenses for home and work.  However, I do have a number of friends who ask "What is that?" with great interest... that is until I tell them how much it will cost them.  Most of the time they are just interested in tinkering with LabVIEW and learning it and don't even have a prospect of making any money with it.

I've gotten some of them onto the Public Betas of LabVIEW so that they have an opportunity to try it.  But this is not a good solution for NI since a new user to LabVIEW can't provide much feedback for the Beta.

A non-commercial license that wasn't super restrictive would be awesome.  It would no doubt encourage the community of LabVIEW developers and might bring in some fresh-new-ideas from the hobbyist sector.   

[NickNZ]

LabVIEW hasn't made much inroads into New Zealand univeristies as teaching & research tend to be combined... making the current student edition too restrictive. When I was at universtiy doing elec engineering degree 8 years ago I learnt C and Java. While I have written embeeded C code - I haven't touched Java, and learnt more about objecs and classes playing around with the LabVIEW Active X excel control demo.

I.e. You should not be getting paid to use the labVIEW personal edition. 

I would include grants as well. 

Also have to consider what some people are trying to do at home these days... 3D printers. Robotics...

[joej]

I think this is an idea that would ultimately increase LabVIEW's acceptance as the programming environment of choice. I'm sure corresponding increases in sales of hardware and interests in pursuing LabVIEW further (certification?) wouldnt be hurting NI any.

I believe the source code should be kept private, in an application builder scenario. Why? To give others concrete motivation to explicitly ask for your code, should they be interested in developing it further, paying you for it - or hiring you to develop it further.

I think that watermarking / splash screens could take care of cheating the application builder's non commercial application intent by making that obvious. Also, limitations - similar to the "2 layer, 4" X 6" PWB dimensions" - would serve to protect NI from abuse of this product.

What would those be? Number of program structures? Number of functions? Number of Sub-VI's? Number of Local / Global Variables? 

Let's say NI did this with limitations on these and other attributes of the environment. Wouldnt it be interesting to see what people do, in terms of their program design, to get things to work anyway?

Kind of like with a 4" X 6" PWB dimension limitation, while really needing more layout space. Make two boards - connect them together with a ribbon cable.

Joe 

[JackDunaway]

---

joej wrote:

Wouldnt it be interesting to see what people do...to get things to work anyway?

---

No, it would be sadistic to force LabVIEW users to re-invent frameworks and architectures in order to adhere to a node-count limitation. Comparing to hardware is a decent parallel, but breaks down when you look at the numbers: for every 10 guys on the internet who collaborate and eventually distribute a freeware PCB, I bet there's 10k who collaborate for a open-source software project.

I made a comment on the previous page that lists 22 proposed limitations, and I would strongly oppose any that would cripple freeware open-source distribution (the worst ones are #3, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 21).

[candidus]

It would be easy for NI to prevent serious commercial use of a personal edition:

All they'd had to do is to remove the option to password-protect or remove BDs.

[JackDunaway]

This Idea has just received a Very Big Vote.

[muks]

>>>This Idea has just received a Very Big Vote.

I get this"The page you are trying to access was not found. Please check your URL for typos and try again."