Use of old perpetual MAC OS-X Licenses on Windows

[ThomAC]

Hi to all,

Is it possible to use old perpetual LabVIEW licenses for MAC OS-X (e.g. LabVIEW 8.1 ... LabVIEW 2013) on Windows?

If yes, how does this work?

I am not familiar with MAC OS-X, but I have learned that the old LabVIEW MAC OS-X licenses do not have a unique serial number.

If this is true, how does the transfer/activation work under Windows for these licenses?

Many thanks for your help!

[Gregory]

If any transfer of licenses is possible, it would probably have to be done by someone at NI. It can't hurt to call and ask.

[ThomAC]

Hi Gregory,

I did but because I have no active SSP contract they told me to post my question here in the forum.

Thomas

[Kyle97330]

You need at a minimum 2 things to try this:

1)  A serial number for the software.  From what I have seen this is usually in the format A##A#####, where A is a letter and # is a number digit.

2)  An installer for the old LabVIEW version you want to use on Windows.

The serial number you would need to already have.  The installer you could look around and see if you could find some old install media on DVDs, or find someone who maintained an archived copy.  Forum rules don't allow anyone to provide direct assistance to you with this part though, as this is one of the services that maintaining an active SSP is for.

Once you get both of those, head over here to the offline activation page:

https://www.ni.com/my/s/support/offline-activation

Put the details in, and if you have them all correct you should see something like this allowing you to activate versions as old as you want to use:

[ThomAC]

Dear Kyle,

Thank you very much for your reply. 

I am aware of the activation web page. Unfortunately I do not have those licenses yet and thus cannot simply try it.

My open question therefore is:

Is it allowed to use an old perpetual LabVIEW license (LabVIEW 8.5 ... 2013) for MAC OS-X on Windows?

(I know this is true for newer LabVIEW licenses. They always have a serial number and they can be used on the operating system of your choice.)

Thanks in advance for any help on this subject.

[rolfk · Accepted solution]

It wasn't in the past. Serial Numbers were also tied to the platform. They relaxed that somewhere around 2020 where a license is not anymore restricted to a specific platform. So in order to let you activate your old serial number on Windows, someone from NI would definitely have to change something in the license server for your serial number.

Sounds like a catch 22.