10-04-2022 09:24 AM
@rwunderl wrote:
@cy... wrote:
... and no access once expired
Punto final. This is the rub. You pay and you pay and it still locks you out in the end.
You lease a car if you want the shiniest toy and you have the money to do so. You buy a less-expensive car if you want something that will last 10 years and not break the bank. (Even if you still need a loan to do it!) But at least those crooked car dealers still give you that option. You are also free to have it serviced elsewhere...
To put it bluntly, it's legally sanctioned ransomware.
10-04-2022 10:20 AM
Thanks @OneOfTheDans .
I normally don't want to "solution" on something but I am interested in checking for my understanding.
Would a "smaller-window-of-time subscription, at a lower price", fill in those potentially missing rungs in your metaphorical ladder?
10-05-2022 11:56 AM
@EricR wrote:
Thanks @OneOfTheDans .
I normally don't want to "solution" on something but I am interested in checking for my understanding.
Would a "smaller-window-of-time subscription, at a lower price", fill in those potentially missing rungs in your metaphorical ladder?
You are trading your developer community for higher profit margins. There are people that enjoy writing code and do it in their free time but will not do it if they have to pay for it. Any way you slice it the software subscription service is a burden for those in, and those interested in joining the LabVIEW developer community. So while subscription services that block access make total sense for business, they don't make much sense for developers, so developers will go elsewhere.
Perhaps a better community edition license will make things better. How about you open it up and say you can use LabVIEW community edition free for business and individuals that do less than <insert number here> in revenue per year.
10-05-2022 02:47 PM
@EricR wrote:
Would a "smaller-window-of-time subscription, at a lower price", fill in those potentially missing rungs in your metaphorical ladder?
Yes, I think it could. For someone using LabVIEW occasionally (once or twice a year for a month), it's much more reasonable to pay only for what you use. In turn they'll hopefully start using LabVIEW more often and become a full-time developer and advocate.
But don't overlook the convenience factor - if you're expecting end users to be starting/stopping subscriptions throughout the year, it needs to be dead simple. Right now I need to get a formal quote from NI, submit that to our purchasing department, get approval, have them generate & send a PO, then NI will send back a license key.
10-05-2022 04:48 PM
Autodesk's Fusion 360 has a free community edition AND a "startup" edition that's free for businesses under $100k in revenue (IIRC) AND a free academic version.
In other words... basically everyone uses Fusion 360 unless they have another CAD package through work (or are so used to Solidworks that they ponied up for a license).
Granted there are some people using the FOSS CAD tools, but you don't see nearly as many people using that as using Fusion360. IMHO, it's a great license model that would be cool to see here too.
Since NI is very much focused on their super big clients, I can't imagine they'd lose too much revenue by giving it to hobbyists or very small startups for free. I have no insight to their numbers though, so what works for CAD might not work for a programming language.
10-05-2022 08:42 PM - edited 10-05-2022 09:04 PM
@EricR wonder if you can consider exploring tokens for simplifying licensing and subscription. Developers subscription to be given set number of tokens per annum (per tier subscription and can carry forward if unutilized) to use NI software, tokens are spent based on hours of usage and software used.
For example, tier 1 allocates N tokens (N = sum of n's) totaled in hours of utilization per year, which developers can use for let say:
tiers can range from light (single developer) to heavy (team of developers). a license server could probably be useful in this case to check in/out licenses, and can double as a local repository for keeping NI software packages up-to-date. and the annual subscription cost should probably be less than that of active SSP, since subscribers have to lose perpetual access.
maybe this can offer much more applicability, simplicity or even incentive for proficiency and efficiency; and make subscription more palatable for some users
10-06-2022 03:31 AM - edited 10-06-2022 03:36 AM
@Jay14159265 wrote:
@EricR wrote:
Thanks @OneOfTheDans .
I normally don't want to "solution" on something but I am interested in checking for my understanding.
Would a "smaller-window-of-time subscription, at a lower price", fill in those potentially missing rungs in your metaphorical ladder?
You are trading your developer community for higher profit margins. There are people that enjoy writing code and do it in their free time but will not do it if they have to pay for it. Any way you slice it the software subscription service is a burden for those in, and those interested in joining the LabVIEW developer community. So while subscription services that block access make total sense for business, they don't make much sense for developers, so developers will go elsewhere.
Perhaps a better community edition license will make things better. How about you open it up and say you can use LabVIEW community edition free for business and individuals that do less than <insert number here> in revenue per year.
Ma son actually started programming in the last few years. He had dabbled in using the game engine "Unreal Engine". Their blueprint portion of their code reminds me a lot of LabVIEW, graphical connections between individual functions.
Anyway, my point was: Unreal engine is free to use. If a game is published and earnings rise above X, only then does Epic get paid. They are then entitled to a certain % of profits. Aside from that, the development suite is completely unlimited and free.
I'm not saying it's a model which would work with LabVIEW (market sizes are significantly different I would assume), but there are precedences like this out there. The ability to download and perfectly legally use the "Unreal Engine" suite (which is an incredibly impressive piece of software BTW) is a great way of getting people into that toolchain.