Selling LabView VIs?

[Paul@ucla]

If I own a copy of LabView and I generate an executable can I sell it to a 3rd party who doesn't own LabView? Will they have any problems running the executable? Would NI consider this piracy or can I treat LabView just like any other programming language?
Thanks -Paul

[Dennis_Knutson]

There are some restrictions and requirements as noted in the release notes of the application builder and they might be somewhere on NI's web site. However, for the most part, you can freely distribute an executable. You'll have to include the LabVIEW run-time engine in order for the 3rd party to run it. You should also check if there are any additional licensing requirments if you are using any of the toolkits.

[C.P. Duif]

During a LabVIEW course (in Zaventem, Belgium), I have asked this
question, and the teachers confirmed that you can actually do this
(selling executables). I presume you mean stand-alone applications, so
customers of you don't need to have LV themselves.

regards,
Chris

"Paul@ucla" wrote:

> If I own a copy of LabView and I generate an executable can I sell it
> to a 3rd party who doesn't own LabView? Will they have any problems
> running the executable? Would NI consider this piracy or can I treat
> LabView just like any other programming language?
> Thanks -Paul

[Labviewguru]

I would like to add a bit of information on deployment of applications/VIs.

It is entirely possible to deploy VIs without buidling them as executables. This is done by deploying one built application, from which other VIs can be called. In my case, I needed to deploy hundreds of small VIs on computers not licensed with LabVIEW. I modified "File Manager.vi" to allow a user to double click on a VI to load it. This was a perfect solution for our situation, as the engineers had some knowledge of LabVIEW operation, but not of development to any extent. This can be implemented in a number of ways, and given the bugs that have been present in the app builder, has been the only way, except for dlls, that I have deployed applications (using a loader built as an
app, with all VIs intact in a deployment directory structure.

Good luck.

[Sippananda]

I am developing and selling excutable VI. My question is how to protect the VI that I created to avoid piracy? Please help, thanks.

[unclebump]

I think there is an option to remove the block diagram, but make sure you try this on another copy of your vi.