LabVIEW
Having to Activate LabVIEW 2010 SP1
It's called job security. Add bug on purpose, fix said bugs, charge money for SP. Time for a new LabVIEW version, cycle repeat, keep job 
.
Ok, thats a bit exaggerated. But it is quite frustrating. For my customer, they have a redundant system with 2 PCs, and all in all it took him about 11 hours to get everything uninstalled and reinstalled on both. But, that's 11 hours he could have been working on something else which actually put him 22 hours, or 2.5 days behind. So, big ouch! If services packs will cost money, then that's that, but I think they need to make an easier way to go back if you accidentally install a SP you haven't paid for, or give you more of a warning that if you haven't purchased it there is no easy way to back up w/o a reinstall.
Today I got told, gosh, even Microsoft doesn't make you do that.
@danny_t wrote:
I have never really got the validity of this situation that having purchased a Product you have to have purchase a SSP in order to get fixs to the product you have purchased.
If I buy anything other than software, I typically get a years warrenty on it, if it has a problem is not fit for purpose, breaks I can return it for a refund or replacement. That is factored into the original price.
I totally understand a SSP that covers extra support / upgrades to new feature etc. But I do not get it for bug fixes / patches.
Well, it's one area where NI didn't copy Microsoft habits to the point. However this has nothing to do with validity. You may feel it not right that you can't purchase a software packet without having to pay for updates. Yet there is nowhere a law that forbids someone to do this. It is unusual for consumer style products, but a very common practice in the industry from process control to industrial automation and more.
Compare it to the old time Unix model, that was even more extreme. There you didn't buy the right to use a particular software forever but instead you paid for the use like a lease contract. As long as you paid the monthly fees (which were actually in the area of what a whole LabVIEW package costs) you were entitled to use the software. Once you stopped paying, even starting up the software was violating the license contract. Yes it's extreme and most people didn't like it, yet it was just as a valid business model as providing free open source software support as a paid contract, just to name another extreme of that scale.
And an SSP is not about new features at all. It is about support and any and all sorts of upgrades. Or are you going to cancel your SSP for 2011, since NI has made a point that it will not really add big new features to it, but that most of the last year has been spent to beat the sh** out of LabVIEW to make it more stable and perform better?
I think NI got themselves a little into problems with the software version naming. It seems they wanted to get away of the old version numbering, since they used to provide the x.x.1 version updates for free. However that also meant no downloadable full x.x.1 versions but only updaters instead. By adapting the SP naming they did somehow create another expectation, that has been preceded by Microsoft practices, where all the SPs are free for legitimate users. So they have to do some explaining, but saying this model is not valid is simply not correct. If you said you don't like it, then ok, there is nothing that I or anyone else could say about that.
@for(imstuck) wrote:
For my customer, they have a redundant system with 2 PCs, and all in all it took him about 11 hours to get everything uninstalled and reinstalled on both. But, that's 11 hours he could have been working on something else which actually put him 22 hours, or 2.5 days behind. So, big ouch! If services packs will cost money, then that's that, but I think they need to make an easier way to go back if you accidentally install a SP you haven't paid for, or give you more of a warning that if you haven't purchased it there is no easy way to back up w/o a reinstall.
Are you telling me they just went ahead and installed it on both computers without first veryfying it at all?????? That does sound very unprofessional to me.
And there is a notice about the need to reactivate the software during the installation process. I get the feeling that nowadays one could tell the user during the installation, that the software is going to install a bunch of viruses, and a root kit to make things nice and funky and they would happely click on the Next button.
@for(imstuck) wrote:
I feel "unprofessional" is a bit harsh. When you are sent DVDs after purchasing a couple thousand dollars worth of new software (FPGA), I think it is a valid assumption that everything they sent you you will need.
Hmmm, if they sent him the software he must still be on the SSP. Otherwise you don't get the DVDs automatically.
And installing a new version (how minor the upgrade is) without testing it first is a big risk with every software. If you take such a risk that's up to you, but you shouldn't complain afterwards if it hit you.
