Blog Post on a Worker Pool Design Pattern without VI Server

[Jarrod_S.]

Sometimes you think there's nothing left to discover and then someone shows you something you never thought of...

This was fascinating. Tomi, a frequent poster over at the Lava forums, posted a new blog entry on his ExpressionFlow blog on a Worker Pool design pattern that doesn't use VI Server to spawn the worker threads, but instead uses the new recursion functionality in LV8.6 and specifically 2009! This is truly an interesting premise, because it not only uses recursion, which people have wanted to use natively in LabVIEW for years, but it uses recursion in a way that standard imperative programming languages would not do well, even though they've supported recursion from the start!

Check it out.

[Tomi_Maila]

Jarrod, thanks for posting the link to the article here. I added a follow up post on the subject as well.

[Neil.Pate]

Tomi,

Can you post the code here also please? The blog requires a login to download it, and that will put a lot of people off (myself included...).

Thanks

Neil

[Tomi_Maila]

Neil, I am sorry but for license and terms of use reasons I don't want to post the code here. Hope you can sign-up to ExpressionFlow and accept the creative common attribution license terms prior to downloading the code.  

[Neil.Pate]

OK Tomi, I accept that.  

Licensing.... another can-o-worms!

Will take a look tonight after hours.

[Tomi_Maila]

Licenses are good, not bad. By default copyright owner owns all the rights. The rights are given to the downloaders with license agreements. The license we are using at ExpressionFlow is Creative Commons Attribution, which is very common and very allowing license for distributing open source source code and documents.

[Neil.Pate]

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Tomi M wrote:
Licenses are good, not bad.

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I don't know about that. These days we are faced with so many software licenses that we have no practical way of avoiding it becomes impossible to manage.

I will goto your blog, register without reading the license agreement because I do not have the time or patience to attempt to understand all the intracacies, and take a look at your software.

If I ever decided to use your ideas in my own (commercial) software then I would start poking around at the license or contact you directly.  But that's just because that would be the "right" thing to do in my mind. Everyone has different interpretations of what is right/wrong/expected etc. This is a minefield here...

<rant over> 🙂

[Tomi_Maila]

I am sorry you feel uncomfortable about the license terms. Being a software company owner I know the difficulty of figuring out the license restrictions of various software components. However that is exactly I provide ExpressionFlow example code with creative commons attribution license. The creative commons licenses do not restrict where the example code can be used and the terms are rather widely known. Shoud example code have no license terms, you would not know how you would be allowed to use or share the code. Now you have it black-on-white.

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Human-readable summary of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license:

You are free:

to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work

to Remix — to adapt the work

Under the following conditions:

Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

With the understanding that:

Waiver — Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.
Other Rights — In no way are any of the following rights affected by the license:

• Your fair dealing or fair use rights;
• The author's moral rights;
• Rights other persons may have either in the work itself or in how the work is used, such as publicity or privacy rights.

Notice — For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link to this web page.

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[Neil.Pate]

Tomi,

in my opinion, all licenses should exist only in human-readable format 🙂

A question regarding the CC license, do derivative works have to propogate the same rights (like GPL etc)? i.e. do I have to make available the source code for any derivative works.

Neil

[F._Schubert]

I just want to hint the technical interested reader of Tomi's blog to the discussion on LAVA.

I want to join the discussion about licencing here. Even reading the FAQ of the Creative Commons Licenses makes my head hurt. Maybe I get it better if I just ask some questions, addressed to Tomi, but others might input as well.

If I use the code from this blog for an application (compiled exe). What do I need to do (ask for permission, print a copyright notice in the about page or documentation, open source code ...)?

The same question if I use any code that was posted on this forum?

The same question for the OpenG tools?

The first two question actually are a question to Tomi why he chose the one and not the other?

How to license code if I want other LV-programmers to use it (even if they include it in a commercial product as exe or source) without any leagal obstacles?

A bit I already learned now is, that the author of whatever may or may not like to be mentioned with a whatever based on his/her work. I personally would like to have my work used for things that makes this world better (I work in photovoltaics = good) and would feel proud if I am mentioned, but I would not like to see my name copyrighting a bomb that kills or harms people. So what licenses are suited for that attitude?

Felix