brian

I was looking at https://www.ni.com/en-us/events/niconnect.html where it says: Elsewhere, it hints that there could be external presentations, but my guess is they'll be industry-focused (and apparently with invited speakers only). Anybody heard more about it? Any thoughts on this?

"at great cost"? I don't think so. They are pretty hackish. Would you put Channel Wires in the same boat? They are not intrinsic, built-in objects, either. Malleable VIs, Classes, Interfaces? Most of the dialogs? Also built in LabVIEW.

"Nice gesture" depends on who's buying, and the other two are... not inaccurate.

XControls, anyone? More seriously, Jeff's vision is for more of LabVIEW to be written in LabVIEW, with the intent that it empowers users like us to extend it. LabVIEW doesn't have to be open source to do that, and my optimism comes from the possibility that the R&D team is going to have more resources to increase extensibility.

Which might be the main impediment to open-sourcing it. The developers working on both products are proud of their work and would be reticent to release it "as-is". They'd want to spend the time to make it presentable to people without flashlights. And NI wouldn't want to spend the money to do it. For NI to choose the open-source route, I think they'd have to consider it the easy (read "cheap") way out, and this isn't it. Did you mean quixotic? I'm not familiar with quitoxic, but it might be a jargon word. Regardless, I am familiar with the NI culture and also with toxic cultures, and NI doesn't have a toxic culture. Believe me on this. It has a good--if not great--culture, with a few aberrations here and there. Many of those aberrations have been sacked. I wouldn't describe it as quixotic, either--I think the NXG decision was reluctantly chosen after years of angst. If you would like to hear my stories about a toxic workplace culture, invite me back for a second night at the bar and I'll tell you all about it. 😮

There are some (including me) who believe that more people in LabVIEW R&D (both CurrentGen and NXG) should better understand how LabVIEW is used in the real world. Regardless, there is a lot of truthiness to your comment, and the reality is way more complicated to explain until I've had at least a couple of beers in me. I've thought a lot about this, but I just don't think it would be a successful open source project. It's not like it's a small library that's easy for someone to understand, much less modify. You need guides with really strong flashlights to show you the way. I speak from experience. When I led the team that created 64-bit LabVIEW 10+ years ago, I had to visit every nook and cranny in the source code, and find the right people with the right flashlights. I think a more viable alternative (if NI didn't want to own LabVIEW any more) would be to spin it out as a subsidiary (or maybe non-profit?) along with the people who know the source code. It wouldn't be super profitable, but might be strong enough to independently support its development. The main impediment to this happening is that LabVIEW FPGA (and to a lesser extent, LabVIEW Real-Time) are really valuable to NI and probably too intertwined with the rest of LabVIEW for NI to keep FPGA and spin out the rest.

The other day, I wrote up a lengthy response to a thread about NXG on the LabVIEW Champions Forum. Fortunately, my computer blue-screened before I could post it--I kind of had the feeling that I was saying too much and it was turning into a "drunk history of NXG" story. Buy me some drinks at the next in-person NIWeek/CLA/GLA Summit/GDevCon, and I'll tell you what I really think! First, I'll say that abandoning NXG was a brave move and I laud NI for making it. I'm biased; I've been advocating this position for many years, well before I left NI in 2014. I called it "The Brian Powell Plan". I'm hopeful, but realistic, about LabVIEW's future. I think it will take a year or more for NI to figure out how to unify the R&D worlds of CurrentGen and NXG--how to modify teams, product planning, code fragments, and everything else. I believe the CurrentGen team was successful because it was small and people left them alone (for the most part). Will the "new world without NXG" return us to the days of a giant software team where everyone inside NI has an opinion about every feature and how it's on the hook for creating 20-40% revenue growth? I sure hope not. That's what I think will take some time for NI to figure out. Will the best of NXG show up easily in CurrentGen? No! But I think the CurrentGen LabVIEW R&D team might finally get the resources to improve some of the big architectural challenges inside the codebase. Also, NI has enormously better product planning capability than they did when I left. I am optimistic about LabVIEW's future.