To WireWorker:
It wasn't just the fact they refused it was HOW and WHY they did it. If we had asked and they had refused because
they never do it we would not have complained. But everything went different. First they decided to plain ignore us.
It took more than three weeks to finally get ahold of somebody at NI, who would at least answer! Thanks, God, we met
the great guy who runs LabVIEW Zone (yes, there are great people at NI!) He tried to help, but his efforts met a
strong resistance too. Even offering NI a share in all the sales of LabHSM that little note on NI News would bring
didn't help. They refused to make money for NI on a competing product! Snobism, vanity, nearsightedness - that's what
drives those people. They are ready to jeopardise the NI's image and lose extra profit increased LabVIEW sales and
popularity would bring just to "protect" some lousy add-on they made. All this time we never heard directly from the
Ni News people at NI at all! They just didn't bother! So much for interaction with loyal developers, whose work
simplifies the life and gives more power to the users of NI's flagship product! If it wasn't for this great man who
runs the Zone we would have never known the real reason of such behavior.
Still not enough for you to reconsider defending NI? Check out the discussion on NI Licensing on info-labview list.
In addition to proposed hassles of activation/deactivation, NI wants to make illegal creating anything with its tools
that would compete with ANY NI product! So, creating things like LabHSM, or, say, LV drivers for non-NI hardware will
be prohibited whatsoever!
And one more thing: if you search for LabHSM in the discussion forums on the NI site you will just find our original
post about LabHSM, but not this thread. Coincidence?
To Ben:
Thank you very much for the wish list.
The very idea of LabHSM was to create a light-weight, simple, powerful and convenient framework for development with
LabVIEW. So, the HSM editor is made with LabVIEW too. Creating a graphical editor with LabVIEW is definetely not
something light-weight and/or simple. Please remember that third-party developers have no access to LV code generator
functions which allow to programmatically generate code in one VI from another. NI engineers use it extensively in
all of their "assistants". Despite the lack of access to those functions LabHSM has major advantages even as it is:
1. Support of hierarchy of states, complete with behavioral inheritance and To History transitions.
2. The uniform code structure is the same regardless of the code purpose, basically all the code looks the same! No
deep nesting is needed to implement complex functionality.
3. You can start coding right away and modify the code as many times as needed. New functionality is introduced (or
removed) without introducing any more mess (complexity) into the diagram code.
