LabVIEW Subscription and Perpetual Licenses Now Available

[oscarfonseca]

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@X. wrote:

Will this apply to academic licenses (campus-wide, department-wide, etc.)?

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Yes, academic volume licenses (AVL) can be both acquired/renewed as a subscription or perpetual with a service program (SSP).

Having a subscription or an active SSP grants access to the benefits of the AVL such as education services credits for training and CLAD certification, student install option (SIO) serial number, on-demand training access, among others.

[danny_t]

Thank you NI that is good news. I have taken up the SSP lapsed discount offer to get back onto the SSP cycle.

May I ask are you still looking / considering tiered pricing either based on company size or turnover or does this announcement mean considerations around that are now off the table indefinitely ?

[GretchenSkellyZimmer]

Once I renew / re-activate my Labview license by buying the perpetual, I will also get the SSP, correct?  Do I have to purchase the SSP every year?  what if I let the SSP lapse; will my perpetual still work?  What if I have to go to Windows 11 next summer, and I buy a new PC with Win11.  Can I transfer my perpetual license to the new PC?

Gretchen

[MengHuiHanTang]

I am going to wait for the official answer from NI. 

But I would think that SSP renewal does not affect the perpetual license. That's why it is called 'Perpetual', right? Also, the license is by user, not by computer. Of course, you can buy a new computer and activate the license on it.  

[MengHuiHanTang]

Hi, Oscar, 

We just renewed the subscription in June, 2024. If we purchased a perpetual license for LabView, could we stop the subscription now and get partially refunded?

[GretchenSkellyZimmer]

Thank you for your response.  In the meantime, I had sent an email to services@ni.com, & this morning I got a response.  Here it is:

"Thank you for reaching out with your inquiries. 

Yes, the perpetual license comes with a 1-year SSP. If the SSP expires you will still have access to you license but will lose the option to update the license, have access to trainings and the technical support. 

You can use your license in any device, just use the Activation Code Generation - NI if needed."

Here is what I asked:

"Once I renew / re-activate my Labview license by buying the perpetual, I will also get the SSP, correct?  Do I have to purchase the SSP every year?  what if I let the SSP lapse; will my perpetual still work?  What if I have to go to Windows 11 next summer, and I buy a new PC with Win11.  Can I transfer my perpetual license to the new PC?"

[EMCCi]

This changes everything honestly, and is the only reason we are still here with LabVIEW, and with an up to date copy.

Big corporations probably have zero problems with a subscription model, but small players need flexibility and can't take the risk of being locked out of their own code.

That's the only reasonable decision if NI cares also about those small players, that sure, will provide a lower revenue individually but also they are more. But most importantly, it's there where the pool of potentially future big players and fresh blood is. Without that, labview ecosystem would have probably dried up irredeemably.

Thank you on behalf of the community, but I think this a reciprocal favour for yourselves too.

[Gregory]

Can I get a perpetual license of the Vision Development Module?

https://www.ni.com/en-us/shop/product/vision-development-module.html

[rwunderl]

I am glad that NI has decided to reinstate the LabVIEW perpetual development license as an option. Unfortunately, if NI cared about hurting our feelings, they would have immediately switched back to a perpetual license model based on the initial outcry from the community. It must simply have taken this long for their bean counters to deduce that the mass exodus was hurting their earnings.

The people spoke with their wallets, which is the only thing a large corporation driven by profits can understand, and for that I commend the community. But now NI has calculated how much to price the “new” perpetual licenses to make up for their losses, and they will stick us with the bill. At 3.5X the subscription cost, it seems like a similar if a bit higher factor than in the past. However, the overall cost is still much higher than (about double?) what it used to be.

I can no longer trust nor depend on the new “NI” to care about LabVIEW or the small developers whose careers depend on it as I did with National Instruments for so many years before. I’m glad you changed your name so I could express this distinction more clearly.

Over the past two years I have been largely successful at replacing LabVIEW with Python as my daily language and will continue to phase out LabVIEW in future projects. So, I thank you for returning to a perpetual license, but the damage has been done. They say it takes four good impressions to make up for one bad one; this is only the first step.