LabVIEW community edition won't activate

[Jay14159265]

Why can't the CE version be a perpetual license? It's such a headache as it is I have given up on CE, which is bad because I actually like and want to use LabView. I can't imagine this terrible CE experience is bringing new users into the fold when not even the diehard users can get it to work. 

[billko]

Community Edition was the first to be a subscription.  I think this was a subscription license beta test and it's still suffering from that.

[rolfk]

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@billko wrote:

Community Edition was the first to be a subscription.  I think this was a subscription license beta test and it's still suffering from that.

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Actually subscriptions existed before. The Base package was sold optionally as a subscription since about 2016 or earlier. All Volume Licenses and Site Licenses as well as the Alliance Member License were 1 year time limited licenses too.

What is different is the entitlement generation. For all commercial licenses that is tied to a serial number stored in the NI license server. For the Community Edition this is generated when you start a download and this entitlement-is strictly tied to whatever user account you are logged in when starting the download. When you try to then license your installation with a different account, nothing works

It doesn’t help that NI in fact has at least two different accounts that may or may not be the same and/or coupled together. One is for ni.com, the other for the forum here. If you have at some point changed your email, because of changing employer, they can easily get out of sync without you noticing for a long time, and getting the right one changed can be an exercise in hide and seek until you find the correct account profile page.

Also NI servers are all behind a Cloudflare shield, theoretically invisible, practically causing regularly very long delays before Cloudflare determined that you are not a bot or even something more nefarious. And those delays can cause timeouts that could render such server interactions with the Community Edition entitlement server invalid.  

[Jay14159265]

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@rolfk wrote:

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@billko wrote:

Community Edition was the first to be a subscription.  I think this was a subscription license beta test and it's still suffering from that.

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Actually subscriptions existed before. The Base package was sold optionally as a subscription since about 2016 or earlier. All Volume Licenses and Site Licenses as well as the Alliance Member License were 1 year time limited licenses too.

What is different is the entitlement generation. For all commercial licenses that is tied to a serial number stored in the NI license server. For the Community Edition this is generated when you start a download and this entitlement-is strictly tied to whatever user account you are logged in when starting the download. When you try to then license your installation with a different account, nothing works

It doesn’t help that NI in fact has at least two different accounts that may or may not be the same and/or coupled together. One is for ni.com, the other for the forum here. If you have at some point changed your email, because of changing employer, they can easily get out of sync without you noticing for a long time, and getting the right one changed can be an exercise in hide and seek until you find the correct account profile page.

Also NI servers are all behind a Cloudflare shield, theoretically invisible, practically causing regularly very long delays before Cloudflare determined that you are not a bot or even something more nefarious. And those delays can cause timeouts that could render such server interactions with the Community Edition entitlement server invalid.  

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When confronted with this, what does NI expect the user to do? 

[rolfk]

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@Jay14159265 wrote:

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When confronted with this, what does NI expect the user to do? 

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The common wisdom was in the past to initiate another download under the correct account. You do not have to actually download the installer. Just start the download and abort it right away. The actual start of the download used to be the part that generates a Community Edition license entitlement in the license server.