An unfortunate development

[Aristos Queue]

Why I won't be pushing the G envelope in code I share with the community in the future:

https://decibel.ni.com/content/thread/13544

[Sparkette]

That's certainly a shame. As I'm sure you know, I think it would be great if the LabVIEW community had access to all the same tools as NI, but I doubt that's going to happen. Sorry if I did anything you or NI didn't like (like the Generic VI thing I posted last night, which I imagine inspired this post) but I really wanted to share my findings with the community. Don't take it personally, not that I think you do; I would have done the same no matter who released it. I wish NI would share more things with the community, even if they aren't fully tested. After all, that's what alpha releases are for.

Edited June 29, 2012 by flarn2006

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

That's certainly a shame. As I'm sure you know, I think it would be great if the LabVIEW community had access to all the same tools as NI, but I doubt that's going to happen. Sorry if I did anything you or NI didn't like (like the Generic VI thing I posted last night, which I imagine inspired this post) but I really wanted to share my findings with the community. Don't take it personally, not that I think you do; I would have done the same no matter who released it. I wish NI would share more things with the community, even if they aren't fully tested. After all, that's what alpha releases are for.

Well even in Open Source projects it's often so that the developers have created helper tools that they may not distribute openly. And no, as long as you are the developer of the code and don't distribute the result there is no Open Source license which obligates you to distribute the source, not even GPL. In the case of commercial applications it's a total fantasy to expect or even hope to get all the internal tools of the software manufacturer too. That would mean among other things also license generators and what else, and you know where that would lead.

[Mr Mike]

I wish NI would share more things with the community, even if they aren't fully tested. After all, that's what alpha releases are for.

I think NI shares a lot with the community. There are a lot of internal details about LabVIEW in the NI KB. There are special INI tokens documented, how we flatten data, how LabVIEW behaves in a lot of solutions. You might want to look through some of our KB articles if you're curious about the internal workings of LabVIEW.

However, I do not think that alpha releases are for incomplete features. Just because we have a feature that's half-done doesn't mean that everyone should be able to use it. There are good reasons we don't finish some features -- they aren't stable enough, they're too resource-expensive, they don't meet the needs of our customers, etc. If we release a feature, we will support it. We still support some decade-old hardware. NI has great technical support. But we can't support everything. I don't speak for NI, but I suspect we would rather support everything we release rather than release everything and have holes in what we support.

[Val Brown]

Why I won't be pushing the G envelope in code I share with the community in the future:

https://decibel.ni.c...nt/thread/13544

FWIW I agree with this stance. It's actually very simple. LV is NOT open source. Never has been and very, very likely never will be. Nor, IMHO, should it be. If someone believes otherwise than build a lookalike and open it up to everyone. I'll expect that to happen about the same time that about the same instant that we discover how to travel time and, to verify that, I'll be there to congratulate you on both achievements.