Best way to distribute LabVIEW Instruments Drivers.

[rolfk]

There have been a few misconceptions spread here it seems

Nobody hinders you to distribute software with copyprotection, encryption and whatever usually badly thought out nonsense. Just don't expect Ni to distribute it through ID Network. You are however free to distribute it through your own servers or something like that.

The copyright notices in many of the NI drivers on the IDNET are from NI because .... Gasp ... they were developed and tested by the IDNET group within NI. Yes NI does develop instrument drivers! They started to do that very early on, because they got requests from users for that. They cannot and will not develop drivers for every device. They have limited resources so while you can submit your driver to them for distribution you can also submit driver requests for specific instruments. NI adds them to a database and whenever there are resources free within the IDNet group this database is checked for the most popular instruments and if it is possible to get that instrument for testing they will develop those driivers and add them to the library.

In early days many inistrument manufacturers didn't know or didn't want to know about LabVIEW. Later some smaller did but some of the bigger ones did not like LabVIEW because iit competed with a product of their own. But incidentially one of them was just about the biggest instrument manufacturer in the world so NI got a lot of requests for drivers for those instruments and they stepped up and developed many of them.

As to copyright in general you have to differentiate to the act of creating copyright and the act of enforcing it. Copyright is in most western legislations created at the moment a work is created. It is independent of a specific remark that claims copyright. What is a work is another debate but we leave that out here. Copyright for a work can only be given up not taken away. Giving it up can be explicitedly (public domain declaration) or implicitedly as part of a work contract where you usually agree that any work you create during your employers time is actually from the employer. There are many variations on this in respect of employment but it would go to far to mention them all.

Of course owning copyright is nice but there is usually nobody who will defend your copyright unless you enforce it yourself. That is an entirely different thing from creating copyright but of course quite important in a world where not everyone plays according to gentlemen rules.