How do you license the VISA driver?

[Sarah2]

I have heard many wonderful things about the VISA driver and believe that it would serve our needs. However, it is unclear from the dowload site just how to license the product. We do not need applications for the user interface, just the driver for C/C++. Is a license required? If so, please provide information on the process to obtain one.

[dc]

VISA is in fact a wonderful product that makes I/O communication very easy by abstracting the bus specific details into one high-level API. NI-VISA is included with any of our development environments (like LabVIEW, LabWindows/CVI, TestStand, etc.) and it also ships with some of our bus control hardware. The product available on the download site is only for the convenience of users who already have an older version of NI-VISA from some other source and want to upgrade that version to the latest release. As far as licensing policy, for distribution purposes, a license for NI-VISA is included with every piece of National Instruments hardware that usually ships with it (GPIB controllers, VXI controllers, PXI controllers, etc.) So, any target system that has one of tho
se pieces of hardware on it, will include a license to NI-VISA. If you are not planning on using NI-VISA with NI hardware (e.g., with the serial port), then you still get a number of distributions with no additional charge but will have to license it beyond that. If you would like to discuss your specific situation in more detail, please let me know and we can figure out how best to suit your needs.

Regards,
Dany Cheij
National Instruments

[JoshuaP]

Here is an update on the NI-VISA License Requirements.