Noncommercial Hobby/Home license for LabVIEW

[altenbach]

It has come up in discusssions that NI does not really cater to hobbyists. A cheap and functional version of LabVIEW is limited to the student edition, which is restricted to a small subset of potential users.

 From the  FAQ:

"The LabVIEW Student Edition is available to students, faculty, and staff for personal educational use only. It is not intended for research or institutional use."

As a suggested first step, I suggest to remove the academia restriction and mold it into a new product:

--- LabVIEW personal edition ---

Licensed as follows:

"The LabVIEW Personal Edition is for personal use only. It is not intended for commercial, research or institutional use."

 It would be available to anyone for noncommercial home use.

LabVIEW currently has the home use exemption that allows installing a copy at home. Unfortunately, if you lose your job, you not only lose your health insurance, but you also lose access to LabVIEW, thus hampering any self paced LabVIEW tinkering that possibly would improve future job prospects. I am sure many retired LabVIEW engineers would love some recreational LabVIEW use. They could be a great asset, because they will have more time helping out in the community and forums. They could even give guest presentations at user group meetings, for example.

The LabVIEW personal edition should include all modules of interest to the hobbyist, including application builder, embedded, FPGA, and robotics.  We should be able to distribute built applications as freeware. Support would be limited to community support.

Installing LabVIEW on every single private home computer in the world would cost NI exactly nothing (except for some sales of the current student edition which is about the price of a textbook, some internet bandwidth, and loss of the zero to two (?) multi-millionaires who actually bought the NI developer suite for themselves. ;)). 99.9% of users would never touch it, but that 0.1% could come up with great new application areas and would help spread the word on how great LabVIEW really is. Soon 0.2% would use it. 🙂

It should follow the "customer class limited" Freemium model, (as defined by Chris Anderson), i.e. limited to personal home use in this case.

The running applications should be clearly identified to prevent commercial use. The splash screen and "about" screen should prominently display the words LabVIEW and National Instruments and could even be used for NI advertising and product placements, for example.

[rex1030]

I also wanted to say that if you are going to do it, you need to make sure LabVIEW Personal Edition has enough functionality to be useful. It better have shared variables, event structures, and most of the other things that we use every day. Otherwise all you are going to be doing is showing millions of people that LabVIEW is useless and inferior to other coding environments.

[JackDunaway]

Good post, rex1030!

>> If NI thinks people aren't sharing hacked copies of LabVIEW they are deluding themselves.

Personal anecdote: I like to keep up with current events with LabVIEW, so I signed up for Google Alerts. After a few days of iteratively honing the query string, "LabVIEW -torrent -crack -rapidshare -hotfile -megaupload -warez" started giving decent results. I still have a Google Alert for simply "LabVIEW", and without fail over 80% of it is crap.

>> If I want a fully-functioning LabVIEW with all the "toolkits" for my house I would have to sell my car to pay for it.

Wow, you've got a nice ride! According to current KBB PPV, I would need to sell 2.09 of my cars to get the Dev Suite! 😄

>>I also wanted to say that if you are going to do it, you need to make sure LabVIEW Personal Edition has enough functionality to be useful.... Otherwise all you are going to be doing is showing millions of people that LabVIEW is useless and inferior to other coding environments.

Agree 100%.

[C.A.H.]

LabVIEW Personal Edition would be a great idea.

As most of you probably know Microsoft released the Visual Studio Express Editions in 2005. These editions are free. They are continuing to releasing new editions. You know for them to continue this they have to be making money on it somehow.

Why can't NI do the same thing. I can see them making money from additional hardware sales as stated earlier in the thread.  I could also have increased sales on the software side. Imagine a user at home developing his skills on the personal edition. Then one day his supervisor or manager tells him the company has a problem that needs to be solved. He tells them about LabVIEW and the company purchases several copies for each plant because this was the solution to there problem. 

No one is going to spend $1,250.00 on software just to try it and because of most peoples schedules the 30 day evaluation version does not allow them time to fully examine LabVIEW's capability. 

.

Come on NI, we know someone there has been reading this thread, Where is the personal edition already?

[G-Money]

Business discussion are in work at National Instruments along the lines of this idea. As a business, we are committed to growing the successful LabVIEW community. Our top concern today is ensuring all LabVIEW users are successful; even more critical than the shear number of LabVIEW seats in the market. We are currently have discussions in-work along the lines of other suggestions from users gaining access to LabVIEW and we will add these inputs to those plans. At a high-level, we are investigating several new packaging and licensing models, including but not limited to software lease models, limited functionality packages, additional education-related options, and expanded ‘project’ / DIY packages. The timeline for those business decisions and ultimate strategy is not concrete or immediate so I will decline this idea for now with the knowledge that we will take this input into consideration for our business strategy.

[G-Money]

This is a popular idea and it has a lot of great comments. Because of this, I felt like we should have a response to this idea sooner rather than later. We have definitely heard the feedback for a Hobbyist type license. There are other avenues for gaining LabVIEW adoption as well as "hobbyists" and we are trying to incorporate all possibilities into our global strategy. This might take a while to determine all possible ways and then choosing the best way but we are investigating the possibility. This idea is being declined because we won't be releasing a hobbyist version of LabVIEW in the next release cycle based on this idea but the comments and inputs listed on this idea will be considered when our global strategy to meeting LabVIEW adoption goals is decided on.

[D.Arunkumar]

I would wait for NI to release the Non commercial version (probably this August during NI Days 2011), This will defenitely make LabVIEW more popular than it is now with hobbiests probing in.

[tst]

You can wait as much as you like, but this idea has been declined, so don't expect it to actually happen. Read the explanation at the end of the idea which says why.

[G-Money]

All of the ideas on Idea Exchange are looked at in "Can we implement this correctly in the near future (next couple releases of LabVIEW)?" This idea was declined with that in mind. This was a really popular idea and it would have been wrong of us as a company to just ignore it with no response. There are no plans to implement a Hobby License or any Non Commerical versions outside of what we already have in the near future. We are always looking to grow LabVIEW use, profenciency, and overall adoption so we are definitely open to this idea. I personally would love to see something like this implemented but since something like this is a higher level business strategy decision, then I don't see it being available in the near future. Hope this helps!

[Halden]

I'm going to chime in here although NI has declared that they won't do this.  My guess is that

the reason that they are not going forward with the hobbyist license is that they're too busy

discussing and deciding other issues.  Eventually, NI leadership will come to understand

that they can only benefit from doing this.  

My company wishes to hire an electrical engineer who knows LabVIEW.  So far, we've found

some people who have an aptitude for programming and have used LabVIEW a little bit in

school or at a previous job many years ago.  But we need someone who can come on board

and contribute immediately; we can't afford to hire someone, send them to LabVIEW school,

and then risk finding out later that they can't program well in LabVIEW or don't enjoy it.  If

engineers looking for work could get an inexpensive copy of the software, they could develop

their proficiency in their spare time and could come to the job interview with a portfolio of

code they have written, ready to discuss programming style and how-tos, and also able to

write a short program on the spot to impress us.  Or, they could study LabVIEW, write some

programs, and decide that is actually isn't all that much fun (hard to imagine, but it happens!)

and save themselves and their next employer time and money.

Because it's hard to find EEs who know LabVIEW, we have to consider using alternative

programming languages.  NI stands to lose a few upgrade fees when companies do this.

But I believe that a better reason for NI to do this is to benefit from the enthusiasm for

LabVIEW that would be expressed in the hobbyist community, inspring more companies

to buy their products.

Halden

[Synaesthete]

It seems like sparkfun.com has some kind of arduino/hobby version for 50 bucks?  Is this just the trial CD?

Providing LabVIEW for the hobbyist market represents a completely different business model for NI.  Dealing with consumer products requires totally different marketing, etc.  With the increasing interest in hobby electronics and the encroaching torrential storm that's going to hit consumer electronics once the "Internet of Things" era comes to fruition, I would hope that NI is gearing itself up for a landslide change in the marketplace.  In my opinion, if things aren't played right, the emerging "event-driven internet" and the "internet of things" markets could come up with solutions for hardware integration and live data acquisition that could make LabVIEW obsolete, and LabVIEW programmers could be competing with web developers for jobs.