Solutions for Viewing VIs

[MichaelBalzer]

---

@EricR wrote:

Many of you have posted recently that NI's change to subscription software creates a challenge viewing VIs outside of an active subscription.  While it was never NI's intention to create this challenge, NI has listened to you and is responding with the following change. Effective immediately, the NI EULA has been updated to allow the LabVIEW Community Edition to be used as a "viewer" for all VIs. This change does not affect LabVIEW Community Edition use for DEVELOPMENT tasks.

This solution satisfies all the requirements NI has gathered and has the advantage of being immediately available for people to use.

I'm attaching the new EULA to this thread. The attached EULA is "official" and can be referenced by any company that wants to make sure it is in compliance.  The online NI EULA and shipping NI EULAs will all be updated in Q1 2023 with the next software release.

NI may also release additional software solutions related to the ability to "view" source code at a later date.

---

Thanks, this offers some confidence for users that their code won't be locked away if and when their subscription license period ends.

That said, this does require a separate LabVIEW installation to view code. Another option I'd much prefer (and I hope is one of the "additional software solutions") is a 'read-only' license which would put LabVIEW into a read-only mode. This read-only license would automatically take effect when the subscription license is no longer valid. This means the same installation could open and view code, just that the IDE would disable any edits.

The reason I suggest this is a recent issue I ran into with LabVIEW license renewal. After needing to chase down NI for how to pay for the subscription renewal, our company paid for the renewal roughly 1 week before it was set to lapse. On the day the license was set to expire, I had a meeting with a customer to perform a code review.

I fired up LabVIEW, and was hit with a message the license had expired and to reactivate. I tried reactivating but the activation failed. Thankfully the customer had a perpetually licensed copy of LabVIEW so we could continue with their copy, but it wasn't a good look.

We had to chase up NI again as to why the activation failed, during which time I couldn't do any work because LV wouldn't open. A read-only license / IDE mode would've saved considerable face, and meant I could at least do some work while the activation issues were sorted out.

[pante]

Thank you Eric, but seriously...

...NI thinks that the main problem of a professional engineer, is to view his code?

... and not to write?

Although, you have a point: we can view our code, to migrate to another language...

[rwunderl]

---

@EricR wrote:

Effective immediately, the NI EULA has been updated to allow the LabVIEW Community Edition to be used as a "viewer" for all VIs.

---

EricR, I appreciate the spirit of this change. As has been mentioned there are some significant challenges that remain, but I highly applaud your willingness to listen to the community and attempt a solution to [at least one of] our issues.

[paul_cardinale]

What follows is just wild speculation on my part.

Sometimes companies want to kill a product, but due to its popularity, want to be able to point to a reasonable excuse.

(An example: Welch's stopped making juice concentrates during the covid-19 pandemic.  The shortages of many products gave them cover.  My guess is that the real reason is that there's a lot less margin on concentrates than on bottled juices).

Something like that may be what is happening here: NI wants to drop LabVIEW as a product, but they want an excuse; so they make the product undesirable, hoping sales will plummet; which would be a good excuse.

[billko]

---

@paul_cardinale wrote:

What follows is just wild speculation on my part.

Sometimes companies want to kill a product, but due to its popularity, want to be able to point to a reasonable excuse.

(An example: Welch's stopped making juice concentrates during the covid-19 pandemic.  The shortages of many products gave them cover.  My guess is that the real reason is that there's a lot less margin on concentrates than on bottled juices).

Something like that may be what is happening here: NI wants to drop LabVIEW as a product, but they want an excuse; so they make the product undesirable, hoping sales will plummet; which would be a good excuse.

---

That is exactly what my cynical side tells me.

[EricR]

Wiebe,

Please recognize that the EULA I attached is the NI general purpose EULA.  It contains language for multiple products, usages, and scenarios.  The relevant section for this specific topic is "Addendum F" in the sub-section "LabVIEW Community Edition".

All of your other comments seem to be about the general EULA itself and not related to the this specific topic.

[EricR]

Christian,

When you launch the product, what does LabVIEW say it is operating as?  It should say "LabVIEW Community Edition".

Functionally, all of LabVIEW is available through the LabVIEW Community Edition.  Therefore the "package manager" view you showed is correct.  LabVIEW is installed, and its running in the "LabVIEW Community Edition" mode.

[EricR]

@MichaelBalzer - These are good points.  I confirm NI is evaluating additional solutions.  That said, solutions that require new features/functionality will take longer to make available.  The primary requirements for this solution were:

1. solutions need to be initially available quickly - ideally without waiting for the next software release
2. solutions must allow users to view any VIs built using LabVIEW Base, Full, or Professional editions to view IP they created even outside of an active subscription
3. solutions require that VIs and other LabVIEW "source" content developed by the end user are viewable in-context as they were created

The first requirement meant NI needed to have a solution that could be usable very quickly.  The second requirement provided a scope of what functionality needed to be available in the initial solution with the assumption that the solution can be iterated on beyond the initial starting point. The third requirement meant that "simple solutions", such as exporting pictures of Block Diagrams and Front Panels was unacceptable and there needed to be a more complete "viewing" experience, that closely resembled the editor experience.

One of the reasons I posted this thread was to capture additional requests, which include:

1. RT, FPGA, and other "modules" and "toolkits" aren't currently licensed in any existing option other than the editor experience
2. enable the functionality without requiring additional installations

To confirm, NI is investigating how to satisfy these additional scenarios.  Because there is no existing solution that can satisfy them, they will take longer to implement.  The time to have an initial solution available seemed important enough to the general LabVIEW community that NI did not want to wait until every possible scenario could be addressed before introducing any solution.  So we are introducing this initial solution the meets the requirements and then continuing to work on additional solutions.

[wiebe@CARYA]

---

@EricR wrote:

Wiebe,

Please recognize that the EULA I attached is the NI general purpose EULA.  It contains language for multiple products, usages, and scenarios.  The relevant section for this specific topic is "Addendum F" in the sub-section "LabVIEW Community Edition".

All of your other comments seem to be about the general EULA itself and not related to the this specific topic.

---

I didn't get that far 🙄...

Without written permission, Community Edition executables are still required to change the application icon 😂.

And to have either no about box, or an about box that mentions NI copyright or a custom copyright.

[altenbach]

---

@EricR wrote:

Christian,

When you launch the product, what does LabVIEW say it is operating as?  It should say "LabVIEW Community Edition".

Functionally, all of LabVIEW is available through the LabVIEW Community Edition.  Therefore the "package manager" view you showed is correct.  LabVIEW is installed, and its running in the "LabVIEW Community Edition" mode.

---

Yes, this is on a clean VM with only the community edition installed. If I try to surgically uninstall the hobbyist toolkit, it also wants to uninstall the "LabVIEW community" entry. However, it does not say that it will also uninstall "LabVIEW 32bit English". It is really not clear what some of these entries are.

Installation, uninstallation is way too slow and I don't want to waste another day just to play around but it seems that if I uninstall the hobbyist toolkit, it drags the "LabVIEW Community" down with it, maybe LabVIEW 32bit remains installed and functional. Maybe not? That was my question.

(As background, I want the community edition only for pure, hardware-free programming without all that extra driver baggage.)