Take This Survey on Actor Framework Specialty Messages

[justACS]

Do you use Actor Framework? If so, I need to hear from you.

There are several messages that ship with Actor Framework, but are not included in Actor Framework.lvlib. As we do the work to transition to open source, I need to understand just how often you use these various specialty messages.

Please help by responding to this very short (seriously, like, one or two minutes) survey:

Actor Framework Specialty Message Survey 

[StevenHowell]

Allen, is LabVIEW going open source?

[justACS]

Yes.  Actor Framework is going open source.

[D_Hooks]

Just to clarify, unless I missed something substantial, Actor Framework is likely going open source.

LabVIEW itself is still very much closed source. 😁

[justACS]

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@D_Hooks wrote:

Just to clarify, unless I missed something substantial, Actor Framework is likely going open source.

LabVIEW itself is still very much closed source. 😁

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That'll teach me to read posts more closely.  AF is going open source - I'm working on that content right now, in fact.  So far, that and the Icon Editor are the only things that are, though some other components and toolkits may go open source in the future.  In part, that will depend on how well these two projects go.

(I fixed my original answer above.)

[BertMcMahan]

What exactly does it mean to go open source for the AF? As far as I know, all of the AF VI's are viewable/not password protected. I'd guess a general decoupling of the AF release cycle from the main LabVIEW cycle?

[justACS]

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@BertMcMahan wrote:

What exactly does it mean to go open source for the AF?

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The big issue is that no one at NI really owns AF, so bug fixes are the only things being done by NI (and not even all of them!).  We've needed to revamp the core libraries to better facilitate PPL builds, and we have a lot of loose tooling that many of us would like to see better integrated with the product.

I have wanted a path for getting these sorts of changes into shipping LabVIEW.  Yes, we can all roll our own, but having an official LabVIEW imprimatur for a community-vetted solution aids adoption, especially in larger accounts.  While NI has not guaranteed that we'll get such blessings, open source is our likely best path at this point.

[D_Hooks]

You're correct that the source code for AF is already freely available. The idea with making AF "open source" is that the community will be able to modify and and maintain the source code, and then NI will re-integrate the modified version into future shipping versions of LabVIEW.

NI is currently investigating this process with the Icon Editor and Actor Framework. Based upon how the experiment goes, other pieces of LabVIEW could be similarly opened up in the future. The idea is that features and toolkits which aren't being actively developed by NI internally could be updated through community initiatives, while retaining their first-class status within the LabVIEW product.

[BertMcMahan]

That sounds wonderful. Will it basically be a public Github repo? I wonder who will maintain it to incorporate pull requests, etc?

[justACS]

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@BertMcMahan wrote:

That sounds wonderful. Will it basically be a public Github repo? I wonder who will maintain it to incorporate pull requests, etc?

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We do, too!  😁

More seriously, that's evolving.  This is a new thing for all of us.