LabVIEW
Hiring Developers and Licensing
Solved!
That depends on two things:
1) Your agreement with the contractor: It is not uncommon that the contractor uses the license of the entity that wants a system to be developed.
2) If you ever intend to be able to look at the code yourself afterwards.
If you leave everything to the contractor including the whole source code you put yourself into a somewhat vulnerable position, especially if things should end up to not run smoothly. Even if your agreement guarantees you the rights on the source code this means nothing if you don't have a LabVIEW license to actually look at that source code and make changes or let another party make changes to it at a later stage.
In addition to what I wrote earlier, the Debug license is not enough to develop the application. Your contractor would also need to own a full development license with the relevant Toolkits in order to be legal. The debug license is only meant to be used on the final target system for debugging purposes and minor code modifications that result from debugging the software, not for the actual development work.
Unless this is about a turn-key solution where you wouldn't care at all if the solution is written in LabVIEW, Python, assembly or Marsian, I would think it to be more sensible choice to have your contractor own the full development license of LabVIEW for the development work and add a debug license to the cost of the project for your own use. That way the software is tested on your hardware with your debug license and if you ever need to have someone look at the program for debugging purposes after the whole software has been delivered, you can do so without having to jump through hoops and loops first.
When we propose such projects we regularly include a debug license into the quote. The customer may never really use it themselves but it gives them ease of mind to know that they can do it if the need should arrive.
Rolfk is on point, and I just wanted to add my experience. I worked for an integration company that would get hired to do work. Some times it would be software only work and the customer had the hardware in mind and purchased and just needed someone to whip up some software and integrate it. In these cases the customer would usually pay a flat amount for some amount of functionality based on a list of requirements, and regular meetings on the progress of the software.
Then I would go on site with the software to deploy it and make sure it works with the whole system. Everything that could be tested before this point should be but somethings just can't be simulated like network infrastructure. At this point the contract turned into an hourly rate until the customer was satisfied. We would provide the source, and a built executable. In some cases the customer would request we purchase a full development license to install on the deployed machine so that they could open, and edit the source after we were done. But in most cases the customer just wanted the source, and if things stopped working would rather call us up to fix it, then try to do it themselves.
So in my opinion if you hire someone to do work for you, they should be expected to have the tools to do the work, including a development license. But having the source available, is important in case things go sour with the hired company afterwords.
You know its funny, people always say that the diagrams are locked because the want to protect their "intellectual property" but somehow it always seems that when I do get access to the code it turns out that the code stinks on ice.
And yes 3rd party VIs with block diagrams that are locked are useless. You see the problem all lies in the phrase "...if the VIs do what you want...". They typically don't and with locked diagrams you can't fix the problems.
-- Mike Porter
