copyright & license legal mention

[X.]

Before it becomes a suggestion (or not), I would like to know whether I am the only one facing the following problem:

I want to release a standalone application developed in LV (not for commercial purposes).

From this thread and this other one (there might be others I missed), I gather that I somehow should have an "About This Application" pop-up window that states my copyright notice and that of LV (the exact wording of which remains a bit uncertain, but I am leaning towards something like "LabVIEW Runtime Engine XXX, Copyright 20XX, National Instruments").

However, I am using a few OpenG VIs and most likely some others from independent or corporate developers, which I have totally forgotten about. I should acknowledge them, but this is relatively cumbersome without a tool to do so systematically.

What is the common or recommended practice?

My (possible) suggestion would be to have this as part of LV development environment: if the user wishes so, he/she would define a copyright statement as part of his/her VIs (as one of the Categories of the VI Properties). Better yet, this would be defined in LV options once and for all (and could be updated, say on a project by project basis).

When building an application, all those copyrights and licenses would be pulled from all the VIs included in the application (a bit tricky with dynamically loaded VIs, admittedly) and made available as an array of strings that could be displayed in a child window ("Other copyright notices and legal agreements associated with this software...").

Any thoughts?

[altenbach]

I was playing with an idea suggestion along the lines of an "about box editor", similar to this post,

If there is a detailed NI document that specifies what needs to be on there, why don't they supply a good template that satisfies all requirements, but at the same time can be customized within certain bounds. I haven't really worked out the details, so please post your idea.

I don't like reading documents, and the help itself points to vaguely specified other documents on the DVD that need to be consulted.

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Note  The front panel window must include a National Instruments copyright notice. Refer to the National Instruments Software License Agreement located on the LabVIEW DVD or CD for more information about the requirements for any About dialog box you create for a LabVIEW application.

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Personally, I take the easy way out by simply leaving the "help...about" menu visible and leaving the stock about box of the runtime engine

untouched. This should satisfy the requirements. 🙂

In addition I typically reserve a "about" tab page that is more specific to my application and contains version and contact information.

Another possibility would be to add another menu entry under help in addition to the stock "About" entry called e.g. "About <my program>". This can be a regular subVI, of course.

Of course a real commercial application needs a single custom about box. Fortunately, I am in academia. 😄

[X.]

In my case the "About VI" trick does not really help because I replace the default menu by a custom one, so I have to recreate a Help menu and an About item in it. I suspect a lot of people do similar things, but I also suspect a lot don't. Which of course means that a generic solution to handle copyright or license issues might be tricky to agree upon. I'll try to spare some time and get this idea rolling.