DAQmx Licensing for Commercial Distribution

[emilbon99]

I'm building a time-series database for hardware data acquisition, and want to provide direct integration with NI Hardware using DAQmx. It's free to download and use for commercial purposes, but are you allowed to embed and distribute the DLLs in a product you plan on charging for?

[rolfk]

You should NOT include the DLLs in your own product! They in itself are useless without a whole bunch of NI device drivers underneath which have to be properly installed. And you could probably spend years in trying to reverse engineer which device drivers need to be installed in which way to integrate that into your own product installer.

Instead you should simply let the user install the DAQmx drivers from the official NI installer. You could host a specific version somewhere as a service to your users but should probably also allow them to simply download their own installer from the NI site and install it from there. Obviously you want to specify a minimum version to install and probably also test regularly if your software still works with the latest driver from NI.

[RobertoBozzolo]

I second Rolf in that determining which actual file to distribute is a nightmare. You should have CVI to build a distribution instead: it will automatically add necessary drivers to the distribution so that the user will have a fully prepared system.

Run Build >> Distributions >> Manage Distributions... menu function and press New... button to start the wizard that will create the distribution for you. This whole section is described in Distributing Applications topic in CVI help.