If you want those VIs specifically, the first thing to do is to ask whoever owns the VIs to post the VIs as source code to a post in forums.ni.com. By posting the VIs there, you agree to the licensing agreement that governs all VIs posted to the forums, which fixes all the legal concerns about the IP for the VIs. The various licensing options used on LAVA or other open source forums could cause issues for LabVIEW if we shipped those VIs in LabVIEW. The license agreement governing VIs posted to forums.ni.com clears those concerns because the author is releasing the VIs under a license that NI lawyers are already comfortable with, and that license clearly allows NI and all of our downstream users to reuse the VIs without concern about viral licenses, redistribution of source, inclusion of original author, etc. All that is in the terms of service that you agree to when you create a forum account.
If the author isn't willing to release the VIs like that, you could post a spec document here for what you'd like to see in a Variant Probe so that someone could rewrite the VIs from scratch, unencumbered by IP licensing of the existing. Someone familiar with those VIs would need to produce the spec document so that someone else could create new VIs by looking only at the spec and never at the original VIs (and thus avoid IP entanglement).
> The Perl Compatible Regular Expressions library was posted on the forums?
I'm not familiar with that library, but either someone posted it to the forums or someone actually puzzled out the IP rights and requirements on it specifically. Posting to the forums is simply the easiest mechanism involving the fewest lawyers.
> The PCRE is embedded in the Match Regular Expression primitive, with accompanying license notice.
Someone clearly went through the approval process to get that added. As I said, it's possible, but tedious. The lawyers have to be sure that we developers are checking off all the fine points of whatever the license requires.
I've left a note over here to ask the developer if they'd consider doing as suggested. If anyone else would also like to see it rolled in, I suggest they do the same. That said, I think it would be fair to let the author know the odds of it getting in before pushing him to release it to NI.
Being the developer of the Variant Probe (and it's accompanying XControl) I'll post a response here.
The software is released under the BSD license, this means that anyone can use the sourcecode and alter it as long as:
-they mention me as the primary developer of parts of the software, and include the disclaimer
I am flattered by the demand! If NI wants to talk about relisencing they have my details to contact me (my email address is in plain text available at the download site). I put quite some time into the probe and like to keep a little bit of control over it.
