LabVIEW
Hide serial number from LabVIEW startup screen.
smercurio_fc wrote:
This would basically prevent Joe Smith grabbing the serial number of a corporate license and activating their license for home use.
NI struggle with the same problem, as Microsoft, Borland, Autodesk, and every other manufacturer of popular software. It is always some smart people who will find a way to bypass the copy protection of the software. And then they do it, the "fix" will spread it self in Cyber space. To get a valid serial number is not an issue in this case.
smercurio_fc wrote:Well, so far, the NI police haven't come barging through our door. I'm frequently reactivating LabVIEW due to reinstalls. If NI is keeing track of me, let me just wave a hello to them.
Besides, I doubt that there's really an "activated too many times" limit. In the scenario I gave where activation reoccurs because of a reinstall, why would NI care in the first place? If it occurs because it's being installed on multiple machines, remember that the license agreement allows you to do this (I'm referring to having a named license). What matters is whether it's being activated by a different party/owner, and I think this is what the point of the question is. I would agree that it makes little sense to display the serial number in the About dialog. That information can be found via the license manager. In a corporate environment you could go one step further and restrict access to the license manager application (say with OS security access control lists). This would basically prevent Joe Smith grabbing the serial number of a corporate license and activating their license for home use.
I think NI can differentiate between reinstalls and installing on several machines because it creates a unique ID for each machine based on the hardware like Windows does.
I know the license agreement allows more than one installation but there has to be a limit.
What's to stop a company from buying one license for five or ten developers? (besides ethics and fear of a disgruntled employee reporting them)
@smercurio_fc wrote:
Actually, that's not the number I, errr..., I mean this other guy that I know would have used if he ever did such a thing. The number used follows the same format, though, so you probably could make any number you wanted, as long as you followed the format.
I always used my birthday encoded as serial number in those old days. Of course with a legal license but it saved me from remembering an arbitrary series of numbers 
@RTSLVU wrote:
I bet LV occasionally phones home and checks its license status and any installations using a now revoked serial number would be disabled.
Until now, the only time NI software phones home is if you register that software and allow direct online registration. The NI mechanisme does most likely do some extended plausibility checks on registration, such as that the same serial number is not registered for different organizations or company names besides the obvious of counting individual instantiations of the same serial number. Together with the hardware key that is produced they also have a pretty good way to detect multiple registrations for the same system or for different systems.
I'm pretty sure that you can register LabVIEW umpteen times for the same hardware key before any alarm goes off, but you may get a phone call soon if you attempt to install the same serial on more than lets say 5 different hardware identifications.
A friend of my once installed some very expensive NI software. That he had been given by some customer to do some work with. Do not remember which Labview system as it is some years ago. Around Labview 8.2. He told me that NI had called up the customer to check what was going on. In this case it was no big deal since the installation was cleared with the locale NI office. But they do some checking after all
@candidus wrote:
I accidently discovered something: The serial number seems to be only required for activation, not for installation itself. If you don't use automatic activation you can enter whatever serial number you want on installation, you just have to use your real one when you activate it.
This is normal. You can even install without any serial number and it will be in evaluation mode.
If you don't activate, it will stop working after the evaluation period has expired.
...then make sure you support the idea mentioned above. 😄
@candidus wrote:
However there's something about the serial number that annoyes me much more: When I receive an upgrade from NI by snail mail it's printed on the envelope so everybody can read it...
