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There is a reason why so many pleas for support of camera access are out there and no single properly working solution except paid toolkits: Actually it's not one but a plethora of reason. - cameras use lots of different interfaces - they often claim to follow a certain standard but usually don't do so to the letter - there are about several dozen different communication standards that a camera manufacture can (try) to follow - it involves moving lots of data AFAP which requires good memory management from the end user application down to the camera interface through many layers of software often from different manufacturers - it costs time, time and even more time to develop - it is fairly complex and not many people have the required knowledge to do it beyond a "Look mom it keeps running without needing to hold its hands (most of the time)" Callback function are not really magic, but there is a reason they are only mentioned in the advanced section of all programming textbooks I know (if they are mentioned at all). Most people tend to have a real hard time to wrap their mind around them. It starts for many already with simple memory pointers but a call back function is simply a memory pointer on steroids. 😀 And just when you think you mastered them you will discover that you haven't really started, as concurrency and multithreading try to not only throw a wrench in your wheels but an entire steam roller.

Yes and acquisitions like DasyLab, MCC and some others clearly fall into the category of buying out competition. Lookout, Electronic Workbench and HiQ are a bit a different sort of story. They were bought to buy knowhow and specific market presence and were for some time actively supported and improved by NI. But then they discovered that they could not compete with the big guys in those markets unless they would be willing to really invest lots and lots of money. And I don't mean a few millions but for each of them a real significant junk of the entire budget that NI had for the whole operation. The other problem was that most of the NI sales people had pretty much no idea about what they really were and consequently couldn't sell them very effectively. Their natural instinct was to point at LabVIEW whenever someone came with an inquiry, even if one of these packages would have fit the customer much better. I think it's unfortunate for each of those three. They were very unique in some ways and would have deserved a more active supportive development by their owner. Electronics Workbench had a dominant role in the educational market by the time NI bought it but is nowadays nothing more than an anecdote in the history of electronic design and development tools. That's for a big part thanks to NI's inactivity and disinterest in it. But if NI hadn't bought it it probably would have ended up as another product of Autodesk or similar, that would sort of market it but really try to nudge the user with soft force into moving to their main product instead. And nothing much would have changed. 😀 Lookout wasn't the biggest player in the market by far but its architecture was very clean and very unique and not encumbered by countless legacy hacks from other SCADA packages that existed in the market since when DOS was the main operating system for them. HiQ was more like Mathematica than Matlab in many ways but still different enough to deserve an independent existence. Of those three only Matlab remains as still a surviving product. Digilent would seem to be again a somewhat different story. I can not see where they possibly could have been a significant competition to NI nor what NI was really expecting from it. I think that it was more acquired as a pretty unfinished idea to create a stronger educational presence and then the market analysts came and killed that idea. MCC in the new NI also clearly isn't any competition anymore to anything they do. Rather it could serve as the entity that combines all the remains of old NI and some of the brands that still have some promises and haven't faltered beyond the possibility of reanimation.

LabVIEW never has been a money maker for NI directly. They were able to develop LabVIEW because of what they earned with their hardware sales. And LabVIEW was used to drive those hardware sales. A very successful model that drove others like HP Vee and such out of the market in the not very long term. Maybe HP/Agilent also was simply already to big for that market segment that they could possibly target with a product like this. The entire T&M component market isn't that huge. For HP it was what they had been starting with, but the big money was earned (and sometimes biggly lost) already in other areas. T&M was good for a steady revenue, but nothing that would stand out on the yearly shareholders report. It was unsexy for non-technicals and rather boring. That was one of the big reasons to separate HP into multiple companies. An attempt to create smaller entities that target a specific market segment and could be fine tuned in the sales and marketing efforts to the needs of that market. About 10 years ago NI reached the size where they started to feel the limitations of the T&M component market themselves. There simply was not a big enough market left that they could capture, to continue their standard double digits yearly sales grow for much longer. Some analysts were hired to look into this and their recommendations were pretty clear. Don't try to be the wholesale everything for all little parts manufacturer in T&M, but concentrate on specific areas where big corporations with huge production lines invest their test and measurement money. Their choice fell on semiconductor testing and more recently the EV market. It has a huge potential and rather than selling ten-thousends of DAQ boxes to hundreds of integrators, they now sell and deliver hundreds of fully assembled turnkey testers to those corporate users and earn with each of them more than they could ever earn with several 1000 DAQ boxes. What used to be NI's core business is nowadays a side line, at best a means to deliver some parts for those testers. But more and more a burden that costs a lot of money in comparison to the revenue it could even under ideal conditions generate. If you can understand this you also can guess where NI is heading. They won't die and their shares will likely not falter. But what they will be has little to do with what they used to be. If LabVIEW still has a place in this I do not know. Personally I think it would be better if it was under the parapluie of a completely separate entity than the new NI but I also have my doubts that that would have long term surviving chances. Earning enough money with a development environments itself is a feat that almost nobody has successfully managed for a longer period. But the sometimes heard request to Open Source LabVIEW has also not a lot of chances. It would likely cause a few people to take a peek at it and then quickly loose interest, since its code base is simply to complex. And there is also the problem that the current LabVIEW source code never could be open sourced as is. There are so many patent encumbered parts in it and 3rd party license dependencies, that nobody would be legally allowed to distribute even a single build of it without first hiring an entire law firm to settle those issues. While NI owns the rights for them or acquired a license to use them, many of these licenses do not give NI the right to simply let others use them as they wish. So open sourcing LabVIEW would be a fairly big investment in time and effort before it could be done. And who is willing to foot that bill?