Leaving LabVIEW after 21 years

[Olli]

Hello,

it's quite a hard decision for me after 21 years of using LabVIEW and NI products, but their licensing strategy makes it very difficult for me to continue with them...now, I'm tired of finding a good compromise and finally give up with NI.

Background:

I'm working in a national public research center financed mainly by public money (government, national research funds, European research funds). The projects I'm involved are mainly dealing with the creation of new methods (testing prototypes and sensors) as a base for environmental models. There are a lot of students doing their theses (master and phD) and I wanted to establish a academic site license, which enables an easy access for the students and also to encourage other colleagues to try out LabVIEW. However, this is not possible, because we are not an University nor another teaching institute. For security and safety reasons only computers which belong to our institute are allowed to connect to our network...student PCs with student licenses are not allowed. As I'm not working as a full-time software developer nor as a "programming service" for students, I don't see any possibility to make LabVIEW accessible and popular to students within our institute.

Many thanks to this forum (I learned a lot) and all the best!

Oliver

[Bob_Schor]

Oliver,

     The Academic wing of LabVIEW (which keeps dwindling) is very sorry to see you go.  I've been in a similar situation -- our University had an Academic Site License, but the "licensing scheme" was on the basis of "Departments".  The entire School of Engineering counted as a single Department, so a significant number of students and faculty had access to LabVIEW.  I was in the School of Medicine, and our Department (with about 20 faculty) wasn't signed up to pay its "fraction", so I didn't originally have access.  However, a third of our faculty had joint appointments in Biomedical Engineering, and half our students were from there, so I could "borrow" a computer with LabVIEW.  I decided this was stupid, so spent my grant funds to pay our Department's license share.

     Getting LabVIEW taught (or even mentioned!) to the BME (and other Engineering students) was another issue.  I offered to teach a course, or give some seminars, and was met with two objections:  "The Dean likes Matlab, so everyone has to take a Matlab course", and "But how would we pay for you?" (I mentioned I was already "paid for").

     Two years ago, NI moved NIWeek from August to May, spelling the death of Academic Day of NI Week and greatly decreasing the number of our European Academic colleagues from attending.  Yet if it is only the Old Guard who are learning and using LabVIEW, who will be around interested in NXG when "Everyone is using Python, which is Free and Open Source ..."?

Bob Schor

LabVIEW Champion

Channel Wire Enthusiast

[mcduff]

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@Bob_Schor wrote:

Oliver,

Yet if it is only the Old Guard who are learning and using LabVIEW, who will be around interested in NXG when "Everyone is using Python, which is Free and Open Source ..."?

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Depends on the what type of company NI is. Does NI make LabVIEW to sell hardware or does NI make software to sell hardware? If in the future all they have to maintain are Python APIs, might be more cost effective. As an example Apple is a hardware company that gives away the majority of their software portfolio.

mcduff

[Olli]

Thank you Bob for sharing your experience and mcduff for your statement!

I'm still keeping my old 1-place license as I want to maintain existing applications.

But my frustration about solving artificial blown-up administrative obstacles grew now over the resistance to introduce open source software into my applications in order to learn and understand "real world" problems.

The positive experience with this is, that I'm not alone and we have a bunch of excellent software developers from all over the world working in our institute. I use the opportunity to increase my inter-department knowledge network and enter another wide and open software developing community (Python).

[alexderjuengere]

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@Olli wrote:

[...]

For security and safety reasons only computers which belong to our institute are allowed to connect to our network...student PCs with student licenses are not allowed.

[...]

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do they have to be connected to the network to work with labview?

is this about having internet access?

or is this about having access to sensitive data-sets?

[Olli]

well...to work with LabVIEW in our labs, they would have to use our license. As we transferred from local licenses to an institute license service, we have only a few personal licences which are all in use by permanent staff and managed by our IT department like other software licenses.

The students can't use their own PCs with their license in order to create new instrumentation VIs for us, because then they violate our license agreement with NI.

[RTSLVU]

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@Olli wrote:

The students can't use their own PCs with their license in order to create new instrumentation VIs for us, because then they violate our license agreement with NI.

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Well that makes no sense to me. As from what I understand, if the students have purchased their own LabVIEW licence then, just like anyone else who purchases LabVIEW, any code they write is their intellectual property and they can give it or even sell it to anyone they want.

[wiebe@CARYA]

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@RTSLVU wrote:

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@Olli wrote:

The students can't use their own PCs with their license in order to create new instrumentation VIs for us, because then they violate our license agreement with NI.

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Well that makes no sense to me. As from what I understand, if the students have purchased their own LabVIEW licence then, just like anyone else who purchases LabVIEW, any code they write is their intellectual property and they can give it or even sell it to anyone they want.

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If the (student) license says "for non commercial use", they are not allowed to sell there code. It would violate the license, as it was obviously used for commercial use.

This is a silly situation though. What if you make something under a non-commercial license and then want to sell it? Start over? Or buy a license just to clear the air?

[RTSLVU]

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wiebe@CARYA wrote:

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@RTSLVU wrote:

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@Olli wrote:

The students can't use their own PCs with their license in order to create new instrumentation VIs for us, because then they violate our license agreement with NI.

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Well that makes no sense to me. As from what I understand, if the students have purchased their own LabVIEW licence then, just like anyone else who purchases LabVIEW, any code they write is their intellectual property and they can give it or even sell it to anyone they want.

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If the (student) license says "for non commercial use", they are not allowed to sell there code. It would violate the license, as it was obviously used for commercial use.

This is a silly situation though. What if you make something under a non-commercial license and then want to sell it? Start over? Or buy a license just to clear the air?

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Oh... yeah I was not thinking of the "student licences" so selling may be out of the question, but that still makes no sense that students attending that institution can not use their student licence that they probably purchased at that institution for projects or research that institution is conducting.

[altenbach]

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@RTSLVU wrote:
Well that makes no sense to me. As from what I understand, if the students have purchased their own LabVIEW licence then, just like anyone else who purchases LabVIEW, any code they write is their intellectual property and they can give it or even sell it to anyone they want.

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Students typically have a student edition, so Addendum E applies.

(Maybe there is one in a million where the very rich parents buy the student a license for LabVIEW Professional and lifelong SSP, but that's probably rare :D)