LabVIEW
What happend to LabVIEW for the Rasperry Pi?
This picture popped up in my Facebook memories not long ago and it got me wondering why LabVIEW for the Raspberry Pi was abandoned and eventually replaced with the LINX toolkit?
This picture was from the Beta. You still had to program in the Windows IDE and deploy to the Pi. But as you can see once deployed it was fully interactive LabVIEW with font panels and everything.
Well, not sure I heard about that. Maybe it was a similar idea like the LabVIEW Arduino Compiler? In any case developing such a toolkit is hard and long work, the broad interest is only there if it doesn't cost anything, so the equation is simple:
lots of work does not match with gratis, free
Linx only really had a chance as it was partly sponsored by NI and in that made life for alternative solutions also harder, although I doubt anyone else would have had the resources, time and motivation to really create such an alternative project beyond the prototype stage. To create a project that shows that something can be done is serious work, but not even 10% of the work to make it a serious product that you can actually give to other people who may not be computer specialists. And if you want to ask money for it, it gets even more complicated to get enough interest to make it worth the effort.
@RTSLVU wrote:
Then how do you explain LabVEW Community Edition?
Among other things, the same reason that there exists the Linx Toolkit for LabVIEW. The person who predominantly did that, was for more than a year on the NI payroll, spending most of his time on this toolkit as a fun internal project. That together with the direct access to developers who had a very deep and intimate knowledge of the LabVIEW interna was mainly responsible that it could be even done. Without this access it would have been possible to create the Linx part that deals with Arduino, but not that which allows to deploy to Raspberry Pi and Beaglebone Black. The LabVIEW internal knowledge about how the integrated ARM compiler works, how the NI Linux RT system was made to work, together with how to integrate in the project provider framework also used for NI RT deployment was not only instrumental, but very essential to that.
Some people in LabVIEW development were NI internally always fairly vocal about trying to find a way to broaden the user base even if it meant to give away LabVIEW for free. And while that was for a long time acknowledged but never really acted on, suddenly around 2019 something changed inside NI and it was considered a viable option to try to do that. But if that is a good sign or not still has to be seen. The Community Edition sounds nice but it has many problems for people to get it properly installed and registered, yet it is free so essentially: "Don't ask for technical support! You got what you paid for!"
Free software as in free beer was often hailed as a success but when a commercial software product started to turn free, it was much more often the beginning of the end.
Someone has to continue to pay the bills of the developers, testers, and other staff necessary to market a product. Without a revenue stream that can be more or less directly attributed to the product in question, it's pretty much an impossible task to convince a board of directors to keep spending money on something. And even if the board of directors is sympathetic to the idea, that will at latest end at the next shareholder meeting when the stock owners demand a two digit gain in both revenues and profit because the stock is otherwise underperforming in comparison to the newest hyped kid on the block and hence worthless. That even holds when a substantial part of the stock is still in the hands of a few who may or may not be concerned about trying to beat the market index. If 30% of a stock is owned by capital investors and they demand minimum earnings or otherwise sell the stock, they don't have the voting power to make decisions but the monetary power to tank the stock, and nobody wants that of course.
That's capitalisme, the only economic model that seems to have survived human egoisme.
@AeroSoul wrote:
I doubt Community edition and Professional edition are so different that it would require a lot of work.
They are technically exactly the same. What differs is a bit of the packaging and currently apparently a different activation infrastructure than what is used for the commercial licensing.
Of course there are minor differences such as some resource changes to identify the product as Community Edition but the code that is compiled into the final executable is essentially exactly the same. That is an important fact as building even a slightly different system has a slew of consequences in packaging and testing the final result. And as you can guess nobody wants to spend thousands of man hours in testing for a product that is given away for free.
