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I have a “Reply†method that always sends a message, since someone else is presumably waiting for it. The reply is an error message if there is an error in, rather than the usual reply message.

I'll try to dig up my old code that does just this. Finding all Copyright notices on the FP of all OpenG VIs was quick, the problem was how to present this to the end user. If each VI has a © notice, does that mean we have to list the copyright for each VI, or just to find all contributors in the code and acknowledge them? Regardless I think it is in the interest of OpenG to define how to acknowledge the contributors, and thus add a VI that returns this information. And, I very much prefer to have a tool that scans the hierarchy for © text than manually have to remember to scan the VIPM hierarchy each time I build an application. Code modules other than OpenG might have to be treated differently, but I guess there are more OpenG code. I also think I made a feature request for VIPM to be able to not only scan the project for used modules, but also return the copyright messages for these modules (even if this doesn't solve the issue with OpenG where individual VIs have different contributors). /J

Okay so it is clear to be in accordance with the BSD license in a binary build, we need to attribute the author(s) somewhere. That can be in several forms, but the easiest to talk about is a About window. In your application you can have an about screen, and there can be a button to click or a link, which opens up and shows the detailed license information. For BSD this is required to be a copy of the BSD copyright notice, and the list of authors. This is how JKI does it with VIPM, clicking on About brings up a window where you can click Copyrights. The question that comes up is how do we easily generate a list of authors, for BSD code that is used? Certainly a pre-build on an application builder can be used to run a VI that generates this text file, which is included in the project. But with this is a few issues. First is potentially large number of files to scan. OpenG has many polymorphic types, and so using scripting to look on the front panel of every VI called looking for the copyright notice might take a decent amount of time. I think a better approach would be to include the authors associated with the package. So if you use the OpenG Tick Count (ms).vi instead of attributing just Jim Kring, and Jean-Pierre Drolet, you'd also attribute Jonathon Green, because he is associated with the package and not that particular file. In my opinion this is fine. We are attributing all authors of the module we are using which is the Time Library. If we go with this technique it would be much easier to attribute authors because you only need to scan the installed packages, and not every file called. Another potential problem is with non OpenG BSD licenses. OpenG has a standard front panel comment attributing authors but other libraries may not. But again if we decide that going with installed packages is sufficient, we can pull the author information from the spec file from each package installed. What about VIPCs, can they be used in making BSD license management easier? A VIPC is a collection of packages, that usually are associated with a specific project. VIPM pro has the feature to scan source code and create a VIPC which is the packages, and versions, that the source uses. This single VIPC file could be made for a project, and then scanned for licenses and authors, which could then create the BSD license file that needs to be included with the application. And lastly another concern is that you maybe using BSD code not installed as a package. Some LAVA Code Repository stuff is not in a package but licensed under BSD. What ever Pre-build functions that are made are going to need to support including BSD attributions that aren't just packages.

I do. Particularly for string manipulation (regex, scan from string etc) where an error is too disruptive. One of my pet peeves, though, is the read from file VIs They give an error 4 when you request more bytes than are left in the file.This has prompted a few of us to create a "filter" vi to reset error 4 which should be a warning at most, IMO.