LabVIEW can support FPGA ?

[Filipe Altoe]

As my accountant says, "Everything is tax deductible until you get audited". I think the case is similar with EULAs. They may be worthless until a lawsuit is filed; then they become evidence as they are a contract between the SW vendor and the user of said SW. I am not a lawyer, but the way I read these clauses, it seems not only the maker of this HW would be in violation of the EULA but also an end user of LV FPGA who decides to use it with this third party HW. Be as it may, something like this on the EULA about LV FPGA may be enough for companies to be afraid of adopting this new hardware. A shame as the community could use a less expensive HW option.

[Neil Pate]

Filipe, I do not see NI getting into the business of suing the end users of LV FPGA.

Not that I disagree with your points, I just think it is unlikely NI would go after anybody other than the obvious primary culprit.

Now, even having said that, I am still not going to expose my company (or my clients) to this risk and will choose NI officially sanctioned products over questionably legitimate offerings.

[Filipe Altoe]

Totally agree. I don't think NI would go after the end user of the third party product, but just the potential liability I think will be enough to hold up adoption. Like you said very well, we wouldn't expose our companies/clients to a potential dangerous loophole. I am sure many others will follow this way of thinking also. Moreover, I do think NI would go after the vendor if their product starts making a wave; so there is the obvious risk of interruption of support in case the Company goes away. I was considering this HW, but always had in the back of my mind a funny feeling it was in violation of some IP/EULA somewhere. I am glad the specific EULA clauses were brought to light in this forum (I hate reading EULAs  ).

The unfortunate thing is that this company could have elected to take the EULA free route to deploy LV to a cheaper FPGA target and have a much higher chance of success. Though that is a much (MUCH!) longer R&D road than the one they took; as my company felt first hand when we developed the Raspberry Pi Compiler product. 

[JKSH]

8 hours ago, Filipe Altoe said:

(I hate reading EULAs  )

This isn't related to EULAs or LabVIEW FPGA, but you might like this site: http://tosdr.org/ 

[zaib khan]

i have the device atom rio but i need drivers for labview from where can i get those drivers?

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

On 9/29/2019 at 12:47 PM, zaib khan said:

i have the device atom rio but i need drivers for labview from where can i get those drivers?

From the hardware manufacturer. They are responsible to support their product. Given their questionable license practice they may be out of business already or it could happen anytime in the future or they decided that the market wasn't good enough to pay for real development expenses and stopped supporting the product. Whatever, if they can't help you nobody else can.

Developing such a product is for sure a serious investment but every company sooner or later learns that maintaining and supporting such a product in the long term costs even more in terms of resources and that is where things get usually abandoned after the initial excitement. The technology is complicated enough that they can't just throw the product on the market and hope for NI to carry the software development burden and cost. There are enough subtle ways to make the NI software NOT work seamless with such a product and that doesn't even need explicit intent.

Edited October 2, 2019 by Rolf Kalbermatter