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Community Editions Available for MacOS

I was excited to hear the news that NI was releasing free, community editions of LabVIEW and LabVIEW NXG.  I went to download it only to discover that it is only available for Windows.

 

Does anyone know if the community editions will be available for macOS?

Message 1 of 13
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Assuming the hold up is Linx, then not this year.  But I did get word that NI is working on porting Linx to MAC and Linux.  At that point, I would expect LabVIEW Community to be available on those platforms.


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Message 2 of 13
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There are plans to realease the Community Edition (sans NXG) for other platforms than Windows. However as crossrulz explained there are certain parts of the actual community edition that have not been finalized for those platforms. One is Linx and the according project plugin support for remote targets that needs to be worked on for these platforms. This was never exercised in the past, since the plugin support only was used for the LabVIEW for Windows Realtime and FPGA toolkits.

 

Rather than holding up the release of the Community Edition until all platforms can be fully supported, they made the decision to release the working Windows version now and the other platforms later. No date for this has been officially announced yet, though.

Rolf Kalbermatter
My Blog
Message 3 of 13
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I have the same question

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Message 4 of 13
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@williamjd wrote:

I have the same question


I have the same answer for you 😀. Don’t expect a more official one from NI until the day they are going to release it.

Rolf Kalbermatter
My Blog
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Message 5 of 13
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Hi Rolf,

You seem to have good inside NI information. 

Why wouldn't they give us some information about when approximately a Mac and Linux version will be released?

To remain in the dark until the release day is not so good, because one cannot properly plan the work.

Thank you!

Adriaan

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Message 6 of 13
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It's not a high priority item. Outside of university environments the large majority of LabVIEW users are on Windows. Linux and especially Mac are very small percentages so there aren't to many resources available to work on this.

 

So while there is some interest to do that, there are many variables that are involved. Workload is not unconsiderable, commitment of resouces isn't a triviality either. And last but not least there is no license manager for non-Windows versions, so there needs to be some thought put in about how to control usage of the Community Edition in some way, as it's not just adding some new product code to the license server like for the Windows version but needs a lot more thought.

 

Until all these things have been carefully evaluated and a decision has been made about them, no expected release date is possible to be announced.

Rolf Kalbermatter
My Blog
Message 7 of 13
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Thank you Rolf. I see that it needs some more work. Because NI thinks that the Linux and Mac user base is a very small percentage, they might just as well put little effort into a license manager. At CERN, for instance, where we have a good mix of OS's and a site license, NI told us they were not interested in how many Linux and Mac users we had. They only liked to know the number of Windows users. 

Thanks again for the info!

Adriaan

Message 8 of 13
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But for use at CERN the Community Edition is not an option for most of the projects as it is to be considered either commercial or educational. And CERN does have a site license for at least Windows and Linux platforms which they pay for a yearly amount. But once you have that, they indeed won't be looking at how many seats you have installed on non-Windows systems, which I would suspect to be quite a few at CERN running under Linux. 

Rolf Kalbermatter
My Blog
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Message 9 of 13
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No, it's not for use at CERN. But I know the user community at CERN where there is a good diversity of OS's being used. I don't know if this is representative for other institutes, but I think for academia this is normal. If there is a free Community Edition, Linux and Mac, for hobby use at home, that could increase considerably the attractiveness of LabVIEW. And feed-back into the professional use later on.

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Message 10 of 13
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