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My reading agrees with yours. Posting to NI.com gives NI an unrestricted license to do whatever they want with it. Further, I don't see why the authors of a work previously released under BSD can't upload it to NI.com and thus grant NI unrestricted use separate from BSD.

Hi Daklu, I would aim to get something like this on the FPGA, I don't understand what would need to change that often once you have it down. Do you mean changing the sample rate of the module or the filter? Don't have the filter VI in front of me but you can change the sample rate of the module without a recompile by using an IO property node on the module. In terms of relative requirements I haven't tried to many. I would expect some form of FIR filter to be pretty efficient. I think anything that requires an FFT and back is going to be pretty resource hungry.

I really want to improve NI's leverage of the LV community and the LV community's ability to steer NI. I have championed this for 12 years. I hope my past actions on this front give me some credibility as you read this post. I am speaking for myself as one developer. And before you read any of the rest of this, yes, I have been telling management all the way up the chain of vice presidents that the licensing situation for VIs vis-a-vis the LV community sucks and I wish something could be done to improve it. From my point of view, the math works like this... Point #1: X = price of LabVIEW, which you all pay N = # of VIs that ship with LabVIEW For a certain class of VIs, whether they ship with LabVIEW or not does not change X. There is greater value to all of you the more N increases without an increase in X. Most individual libraries do not move X. LV 2013 will cost the same with or without JSON support. Point #2: P = the number of LV users who may use VIs under the BSD license Q = the number of LV users who may use VIs downloaded from ni.com R = the number of LV users who may use VIs ship with the base package of LabVIEW Q = R (because the licenses are equivalent) R = P + (people who work at companies that have some problem with the BSD) Regardless of the problem with the BSD -- and many of the problems are imaginary, I'll grant -- the set of users who gain access to a VI that is on ni.com is strictly greater than the set of users who have access through the BSD. Point #3: Among the set of users who cannot use the BSD code are those of us who work for National Instruments. Why? 1. NI cannot ship VIs that are still under the BSD because the BSD requires that if User A writes VIs under the BSD, then User B uses those VIs, User B has to give credit to User A in their final product. NI is not going to make users track which VIs from vi.lib they are using in their product in order to give credit to another user. The VIs that ship with LV have to be owned by NI free and clear. 2. So that means NI can license those VIs, right? Wrong. This is a library that took a few of you a couple weeks to put together. How much would you charge NI for this library? How much would it cost NI to pay the lawyers to draw up the forms to do the transfer of ownership? Now ask yourself whether those costs exceed the cost for NI of just telling its own internal developers to write the library? Almost certainly not. If nothing else, the paperwork is smaller. If we were talking about patentable work or work that took a year to put together, that would be a different story. But at that point, you probably wouldn't be giving it away for free on LAVA either. 3. In this particular case, getting a JSON library into the next version of LabVIEW is not a super high priority for NI. I believe it should be, but I am one developer and, despite the opinion some of you have because of my presence on the forums, I do not have enough political or financial force to insist NI share my priorities. So NI is not going to license the library. That leaves me developing one in my project time (which is different from working on this outside of work). But I have to avoid creating the appearance of having copied source code that we don't have the right to copy, so I pretty much have to avoid looking at VIs when they are on the same project that I'm already known to be working on, otherwise I open NI up to lawsuits. Are any of you likely to sue NI for violating the BSD over this library? I don't know, and I can't really take the risk. Point 4: The value of an individual VI increases the more it is supported and maintained. The LAVA Code Repository provides coding standards and insists on a certain amount of maintenance for the code. When NI ships VIs with LabVIEW, those VIs get documentation, localization, testing in the next version of LabVIEW, and dedicated technical support. The level of support is higher, and that makes those VIs more valuable. What all these points lead to: If you truly want a VI to have maximum distribution and maximum support, you want that VI to be in the next version of LabVIEW in the Base Package. I do NOT think you should hand over truly valuable IP to NI free of charge if NI is going to hide it away in the Full or Pro packages or sell it separately in a toolkit/module. I do think that you should hand the IP over to NI free of charge if you want it to be available to everyone, really everyone. The BSD is not everyone, no matter how much you want it to be. Posting it on NI.com really does mean giving it away to everyone who uses LabVIEW. NI is not going to go removing ni.com content, so whatever you post will be available for the future for everyone to download. But we might take those VIs and incorporate them into projects, thus elevating their level of support and accessibility. So especially when you have a reasonable expectation that someone within NI is working on a given project, one that he has already been sharing back to the community, I believe it makes sense to post those VIs on ni.com. Now, CRelf asks a good question: I don't have an answer here exactly. The desire to get recognition for work done is the sticking point. I am not a lawyer. I believe there should be a way to create a license that says something like, "I am giving these VIs away to the LabVIEW community, inclusive of National Instruments itself. They may be used by everyone." But if the author wants everyone who uses their VIs to give them credit, that's the problem. You can't tell who wrote each individual VIs in vi.lib. Our work gets the stamp of "National Instruments". If you use the Actor Framework, you don't have to stamp your work "Used with permission of Aristos Queue."At the end of the day, what I really want to highlight, is that NI's relationship to LabVIEW is fundamentally different from, for example, Microsoft's relationship to C++. MS makes a great C++ compiler, but they are not the only vendor, and there is a reason to license a library to make sure it doesn't hide under MS's umbrella. But LV and NI are tightly bound, and no one can write VIs without using LV. Giving a VI to NI is much different from giving a C++ library to MS. The community of LV users is the group of people who have paid money to NI plus the pirates who don't care about software licensing one way or the other. And everyone has access to the VIs on ni.com. Everyone. And, for the record, I have totally put my money where my mouth is. I do develop VIs on my own time, and when I first started at NI, I made sure to do those on a separate computer that did not have remote desktop abilities and I kept them on separate disks so I could document that I had ownership of the IP. And then I would share them out to folks on my own terms. As time went by, I realized that was kind of silly... I had access to the largest distribution channel for VIs in existence, and if I just gave up having my identity tightly associated with the particular VIs, the VIs themselves became more valuable. So I rolled a lot of my VIs into vi.lib. If I were writing a product that I intended to sell, I would go back to my coding-in-isolation style. And then the lawyers pointed out that VIs on ni.com could be used by me in LV, which gave me a channel -- finally -- for a user to give me a VI that I could then place into LabVIEW. Win! If you want to really give away a VI, give it to NI through ni.com. It's the only mechanism that I know of to truly share with the entire LV community.