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Doesn't it sound funny in your own ears: License agreement, and then breaking that agreement? Why do you think it's up to you to decide which parts of the agreement to follow and not to follow? That is the main point, I think, that irks us on this board; that you display such indifference to violating a contract that you have signed. I would never hire a guy like you, if I found such statements as yours on the internet. I simply wouldn't trust that you would honor any agreement that we made. Sure, software licensing is up for a major change over the comming years. That probably goes for large parts of the digital media usage legislation. But until that happens you have an agreement with your software vendor, no matter if you have paid for that software or it's free. One of the much talked about things currently is if you actually have the right to resell "used" software. My opinion is that you should be allowed to, but many software vendors disagree. Several large companies are in the process of changing their licensing schemes so you lease their software for a limited time (20 years for instance), in which case you definetely cannot transfer your contract to a third party. So, probably nothing bad will happen if you don't tell anyone what you do, but it's definetely a problem if you involve others. And even if you keep it exclusively to yourself it's still a violation, it's just not one with a high risk of getting spotted by anyone. Anybody can put anything into a contract as long as it's not violating any other law, and if you sign that contract (for instance when buying a car) it's binding. Using your analogy; Porsche had a very special paintjob on a very small number of 911s a year or two back, where they put in the buyer's contract that they were never allowed to repaint the car, and any damages to the paint should always be taken to the Porsche factory for repair. Nobody else are allowed to touch up that paintjob. That's a legal contract, and I expect those select Porsche owners are thrilled by owning such a special car . You break a contract. Contracts (your trustworthyness basically) and money are two things that glue the world together. It's taken very seriously when you mess with either. And damages? One could think up a number of possible damaging outcomes from you looking at source code you agreed not to look at for instance; You could get technical inspiration that made you rich in a couple of years - you could even turn out to become that software vendor's biggest competitor in the market. It could be even worse than that. A slight mention of how to break a licensing scheme (just wisper "MD5" and "Calypso algorithm" in the wrong forum) could potentially mean that some poor sole sold 5 instead of 5,000,000 licenses of his or her software. There are many many real world cases that supports this statement; Nero Multimedia, Winzip, Ghisler (makers of Total Commander), and IDM (makers of UltraEdit) for instance. /Steen

This is just silly. Of course theres a difference. If there was no difference we would use the same word to describe both types of property. In the dictionary if you look up Intellectual Property it will not say "See Physical Property". I also don't condone releasing anything to break NI's password protection scheme, but I also think it isn't in your place to say that he "WILL get into trouble" if anything is released. What happened to the last guy that released a password cracker that works on all VIs between 7.x and 2011? Well I don't know for sure but his website is still up with the source code, and will even remove the password by uploading a VI.

Count me in too. Attached is my LabVIEW Project API, (I've posted bits before). Don't think its ready for prime-time either, but am happy to post as is. Tested only with LV2009 thus far. Cheers -JG jgcode_lib_labview_project_api-2.0.1-1.vip jgcode_rsc_jgcode_library_palette-1.2-1.ogp