Licencing of .exe's

[alecjcook]

Hi,

   National instruments allow you to install LabVIEW on 3 computers. One of which can be your home PC, they are OK with this. What then if I develop an application on this copy of LabVIEW and want to sell it. Is this shakey grounds as far as licencing is concerned?

Many thanks, Alec

[mikeporter]

You obviously can't include a copy of LV, but if you build an executable there are no additional licensing requirements.

Mike...

[Dennis_Knutson]

It's all spelled out in the license agreement. You can distribute as many copies of the exe and runtime engine as you want.

[crossrulz]

READ THE END USER AGREEMENT.  Be very careful in there.  You can distribute your executable and the LabVIEW RTE as much as you want.  But there are little things in there saying your need to reference an NI license.  I think one of the things is to include NI's copyright information in an About Box.

[mikeporter]

Good point. At the end of the Core 2 class there used to be an exercise where you created a "About..." dialog and it gave the text you were supposed to include -- however there was no requirement that you have an "About..." dialog, so the issue always seemed rather muddled. An then at one point, a long time ago, there was a stipulation that there was no further license fee only if you also sold them some NI hardware. Let me tell you nobody was sad to see that go away.

So yes, read the license -- at least once a year -- just to keep up.

Mike...

[Norbert_B]

General points (not necessarily connected to LV) when talking about "licenses" and "distribution":

1. Nearly all developers design their application in such way that it will require a license. This can be on purpose or simply by using components (like GNU public components) during development. So it is the task of the developer to create/bundle all these licenses including the appropriate license agreements.
2. Installing software will, as mentioned above, require to accept the appropriate license agreement(s). Therefore, the installation routine should either directly display or link to the EULA (end user license agreement). It is also recommended, to create a simple way in the application itself to review the license agreement (as Mike pointed out).
3. Software licenses do not necessarily mean that the license is liable to costs. It is, first of all, a legal statement for use cases.
• When a software license is liable to costs, most developers are looking for license/software activation to minimize abuse of licenses. There are different methods for this, including registry entries, license manager software (like NILM, based of FlexLM) or hardware dongles.
• When a software license is free of charge, a simple link to the EULA is sufficient.

So to wrap things up:

• Each software component should have a license agreement (legal).
• Not all licenses are creating costs.

To project on LV:

• Yes, the LV runtime engine (LV RTE) requires a license.
• The LV RTE is free of charge. The EULA for the LV RTE for developers state that distributing the LV application requires the RTE and the user implicitely accepts the LV RTE EULA when using the software.

This is not a very detailed legal information (e.g. there might be complications if you sell your application to restricted customers/nations), so when in doubt, read the EUAL and/or contact NI for legal information.

Norbert