NI's New Software Subscription Model

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

4 hours ago, ShaunR said:

However, the point I'm obviously failing to make is that Python has already conquered one niche space that used to be a strong selling point for LabVIEW and making it  Software-as-a-service will make it even more unpalatable going forward. Don't get hung-up on Python though. Javascript is a contender also. However Python is more ubiquitous in T&M at present.

Don't get me started on Java Script. Maybe if you absolutely want to program a Discord bot for some reason, you can't really get around it. And if you want to botch your HTML documents you can use that too. But other than that Java Script uses the syntax of Java with the logic that you had with Basic. Not even one single provision to try to prevent the programmer from writing absolutely bad code, just like what we had with Basic.

Quote

That's a point. What happens to that? Is that outside of this subscription model?

Community Edition is already a subscription model technically. Just with a subscription fee of $0 and the limitation that you are not allowed to use it for anything that earns you money. It expires at the end of the year and you have to reactivate it.

If you use it to keep up to date with your LabVIEW knowledge that is fine, if you create open source free libraries to distribute, that is fine too. If you automate your door bell, weather station or model train layout at home, that is also allowed.

But creating a Toolkit that you sell, or teaching a course for which you get paid is not a valid use case for the Community Edition. Same about writing a test application for your or someone else's company that tests some products that are then sold.

An interesting corner case would be to create tutorials for your youtobe channel. If that youtobe channel ends up being watched a lot and earning you more than a few (as in some two digits, just a number I came up with but I'm sure is about what NI would consider still valid) bucks per year, you are violating the Community Edition license conditions.

Edited December 16, 2021 by Rolf Kalbermatter

[Bryan]

13 hours ago, Rolf Kalbermatter said:

An interesting corner case would be to create tutorials for your youtobe channel. If that youtobe channel ends up being watched a lot and earning you more than a few (as in some two digits, just a number I came up with but I'm sure is about what NI would consider still valid) bucks per year, you are violating the Community Edition license conditions.

That is an interesting case, but based on the piddly amount of compensation that most average Joe's get for their channels, I would expect NI to overlook that case based on the fact that you are essentially giving them free advertising and potentially drumming up interest for their products.  

Many channels are sent free products by companies in the hopes that the channel will shill their product, or at least give them some free exposure.  I wouldn't think that NI would be any different, but I could most definitely be wrong.

Edited December 17, 2021 by Bryan

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

11 minutes ago, Bryan said:

That is an interesting case, but based on the piddly amount of compensation that most average Joe's get for their channels, I would expect NI to overlook that case based on the fact that you are essentially giving them free advertising and potentially drumming up interest for their products.  

Many channels are sent free products by companies in the hopes that the channel will shill their product, or at least give them some free exposure.  I wouldn't think that NI would be any different, but I could most definitely be wrong.

Yes it is virtually unthinkable that you could create a youtobe channel based on LabVIEW tutorials that will give you million $ earnings. It's as such more of a legal thought exercise than anything else.

But the overall idea of the Community Edition license is: If you or someone you know makes money from your use of the Community Edition, you are in violation of the license!

If that turns out to be a free meal for you, or some other such peanuts, NI would never even bother to startup their legal engine for it, but if it gets significant you will be in very hot waters. A cease and desist letter is cheap, but can be the end of any small business in an eye blink.

[Jordan Kuehn]

37 minutes ago, Rolf Kalbermatter said:

But the overall idea of the Community Edition license is: If you or someone you know makes money from your use of the Community Edition, you are in violation of the license!

What if you created an open source tool kit via CE and then someone else profited utilizing it? Arguably the best use case for CE to built out the community code could get legally murky? I am not a lawyer, just an engineer. 

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

2 hours ago, Jordan Kuehn said:

What if you created an open source tool kit via CE and then someone else profited utilizing it? Arguably the best use case for CE to built out the community code could get legally murky? I am not a lawyer, just an engineer. 

If that person owns a commercial LabVIEW version at the time she/he uses your toolkit for their commercial work, all is fine. If they don't, it is them being in violation.

The example I was actually having in mind is different. If you use LabVIEW Community Edition to develop a test program for a friend, who then uses it to test a product he sells in any form, then you (more correctly him but you could be held liable) would be in violation, unless that friend has a commercial license to run and/or built the test program.

 

Edited December 17, 2021 by Rolf Kalbermatter

[ShaunR]

2 minutes ago, Rolf Kalbermatter said:

then you would be in violation, unless that friend has a commercial license to run and/or built the test program.

That doesn't make much sense. Only one of these parties can have culpability and culpability cannot be transferred.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

36 minutes ago, ShaunR said:

That doesn't make much sense. Only one of these parties can have culpability and culpability cannot be transferred.

Is it that simple? If you let a gun slinger around openly for which you have a license to own, and someone else is using it to kill someone, you are still in error too and can be prosecuted for that, not for the murder in itself usually, but there are exceptions too. It will also probably depend a bit on what sort of lawyer you can afford!

Even if a judge will eventually decide that your friend is the wrongdoer and therefore liable, you might still have to deal with the hassles as they try to get after you to get the necessary facts to charge that friend.

I didn't know he was going to use that test program to test his new gadget he wanted to sell!

sounds in any case very weak!

Edited December 17, 2021 by Rolf Kalbermatter

[Phillip Brooks]

1 hour ago, ShaunR said:

That doesn't make much sense. Only one of these parties can have culpability and culpability cannot be transferred.

NI is in Texas, and nothing makes sense in Texas - 

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/texas-abortion-law-explained/

     "SB 8 allows any private citizen in Texas, or elsewhere, to sue anyone who performs an abortion in the state after an embryo’s cardiac activity can be detected.

       It also allows any private citizen to sue anyone (in Texas or elsewhere) who “aids or abets” anyone in getting an abortion in Texas after that period or anyone who intends to aid or abet that process."

 

[ShaunR]

2 hours ago, Rolf Kalbermatter said:

Is it that simple? If you let a gun slinger around openly for which you have a license to own, and someone else is using it to kill someone, you are still in error too and can be prosecuted for that, not for the murder in itself usually, but there are exceptions too. It will also probably depend a bit on what sort of lawyer you can afford!

Even if a judge will eventually decide that your friend is the wrongdoer and therefore liable, you might still have to deal with the hassles as they try to get after you to get the necessary facts to charge that friend.

I didn't know he was going to use that test program to test his new gadget he wanted to sell!

sounds in any case very weak!

The analogy is incongruous from your original.

You stated that the licence that the second party may have, can absolve themselves of culpability. The culpability of the supplier is moot as they supplied it in good faith under the licence they have.

But to your actual analogy. It depends. In the US, Dominic Black is being charged with "intent to sell a dangerous weapon to a person under age 18" to Kyle Rittenhouse who used a gun and killed people. The charge isn't the selling, per say, it is that the person being sold to was underage. However, if the intent was not to sell the firearm (knowing that the person is under 18), then the charges will fail.

So again back to culpability. If the CE software is sold with the intent of making a profit, then the seller is in breach, not the recipient. Otherwise they are not. Once the recipient takes ownership they may introduce it into their software and then they are bound by whatever licence they have. If they have a proper licence, then they are free to make a profit (as you said) if not, they can't sell their own product anyway, regardless of the dependent software.

Edited December 17, 2021 by ShaunR

[Gribo]

NI is shooting themselves in the foot with this approach. It is already difficult enough to find LabVIEW programmers. The IDE seems straight out of 2002, proprietary file formats, hard time integrating with version control and CI flows, Do they really want to drive away their potential customers?

I use LV for many things, but I avoid the pay to deploy tools (IMAQ, Teststand). If I have to pay upkeep to NI, I'll recommend Python, the 3rd party hardware support is similar with pyVISA. No upkeep, no licenses, no deployment fees.

[X___]

NI stock is doing fine. Some corporate brass sold a bunch of their shares (to the benefit of some family trusts...) either creating a dip in the stock or anticipating it, but that was transitory, and things are back to normal.

The point is that LV was most likely never a driver of sales and as someone said before, they don't need it to sell their hardware anymore, thanks indeed to the free support of other development environments, which did not exist in the 90's.

I am repeating myself, but as much as I enjoy graphical programming, I see no future for it in the academic field, where open sourcing and reproducibility (R, Jupyter or Mathematica notebooks being one way of ensuring it, preferably online), is (slowly) becoming the norm.

Obviously, the situation is a bit different in industry.

I honestly don't see what the big deal is with this announcement (which I pictured earlier as a price cut), as surely a couple thousand dollars per workstation per year can't create that much of a difference for a successful company, even a small one that would decide to wait and see before upgrading to the new yearly bug fix.  Last year's official abandonment of any effort to revamp LV, was the nail in the coffin. This is just a confirmation that there is nothing more to expect from it.

[JB_1592]

On 12/14/2021 at 4:04 PM, Bryan said:

National Microsoft... err... Microsoft Instruments... I mean... National Instruments is becoming more like Microsoft each year and I'm not liking it. 

I chuckled, but honestly NI seems to be doing a far worse job of this than Microsoft. Office, the formerly perpetual SaaS product I'm most familiar with, has a lower cost of ownership if you keep up with the latest version now. That doesn't seem to be the case looking at NI's subscription prices. I understand that if you are the type to buy a perpetual license and skip several versions between upgrades that any SaaS model isn't a welcome change, but in my opinion the biggest issue here is the apparent higher cost to stay up to date.

 

On 12/15/2021 at 8:17 PM, X___ said:

So, for most practical purposes it is a cleverly framed price cut...

I don't know about that. Maybe for someone that buys an entire new license at full cost every X number of years, but for those that kept their SSP up to date it seems like it will more than double the annual cost.

The lower startup cost is nice, but irrelevant when we have had our licenses for years, and doesn't make up for the higher long term costs, IMO. I really hope they start talking about renewal discounts at some point, but... who knows?

The only benefit I see to this is that it might make the decision to add/drop licenses from our VLA simpler. Now we tend to renew unused licenses every year just so we don't get slammed with the 5x higher cost if we need to rebuy them.

 

On 12/14/2021 at 4:35 PM, hooovahh said:

Good point.  I wonder if people are going to go out and buy a perpetual 2021 license while they can.  I currently get my license from a VLA that we renew each year.  Depending on the options we may just renew like normal.  I do suspect the price will go up compared to what we currently pay but we'd get access to lots of other software we currently don't.

You're referring to the Test Workflow bundles? They made it pretty confusing by combining them with the subscription announcement, but those are just new product bundles., not what the entire licensing model is going towards. LabVIEW is still available as a standalone subscription. (The new bundles look interesting, but I'm already on the Automated Test Software Suite and would have to really look at the impact of switching to one of those since I still need to support a lot of things that were/are done with CVI.)

Seems to me like there's still a lot of unknowns. Wonder how this will impact the way we manage licenses through our VLM server, if there's any changes to how multi-seat licenses work, etc...

[X___]

17 hours ago, JB_1592 said:

I don't know about that. Maybe for someone that buys an entire new license at full cost every X number of years, but for those that kept their SSP up to date it seems like it will more than double the annual cost.

The lower startup cost is nice, but irrelevant when we have had our licenses for years, and doesn't make up for the higher long term costs, IMO. I really hope they start talking about renewal discounts at some point, but... who knows?

The only benefit I see to this is that it might make the decision to add/drop licenses from our VLA simpler. Now we tend to renew unused licenses every year just so we don't get slammed with the 5x higher cost if we need to rebuy them.

Interesting. I forgot that maintaining an active SSP was cheaper than paying for the software upfront (I am not dealing with that aspect).

Now I wonder what "access to historical versions" means. Can we try to run LabVIEW 1.0 on a Macintosh VM? LabvVIEW 2.5 on a Windows 3.1 VM? That could be a lot of fun.

[ShaunR]

4 hours ago, X___ said:

Now I wonder what "access to historical versions" means. Can we try to run LabVIEW 1.0 on a Macintosh VM? LabvVIEW 2.5 on a Windows 3.1 VM? That could be a lot of fun.

Based on the terminology overall. It would mean that if the first SaaS version was 2022 and the latest version was 2024. If you produced software in version 2022, 2023 or 2024 and didn't keep up your subscription, you wouldn't be able to maintain any of the software.

[LogMAN]

14 hours ago, X___ said:

Now I wonder what "access to historical versions" means. Can we try to run LabVIEW 1.0 on a Macintosh VM? LabvVIEW 2.5 on a Windows 3.1 VM? That could be a lot of fun.

Well, technically speaking that should be the case if you take their answer literally (and ignore the rest of the sentence) 

Quote

Is it mandatory to update to the newest version when using a subscription?

No, while subscriptions provide access to the latest version, you are welcome to use any previous version of the NI software in your subscription. 

Most likely, though, it will allow you to use any version listed on the downloads page, which currently goes back to LV2009. You might also be able to activate earlier versions if you still have access to the installer but I'd be surprise if that went back further than perhaps 8.0. Only NI can tell.

Edited December 20, 2021 by LogMAN
Correcting myself like a 🐱‍👤

[Zyga]

Does anyone know for how long perpetual license will be available? Could not find any information. In the FAQ there is nothing mentioned abut partner licenses in which we have for example a VDM which is not covered by any of a subscription plans. Does anyone knows what happens with partner licenses?

[LogMAN]

58 minutes ago, Zyga said:

Does anyone know for how long perpetual license will be available?

The answer is in the title.

Quote

Beginning January 2022, NI software is moving to subscription-based licenses.

-- https://www.ni.com/en-us/landing/subscription-software.html

NI will stop selling perpetual licenses by the end of this year. Any licenses renewed before that date will continue until they expire, after which NI will offer subscription-based licenses.

[Zyga]

Just got an answer from NI and they says that nothing is changing for partners license. Neither price and neither coverage. 

[Gribo]

Got to love how the 1 year subscription is 6K CAD and the 3 years is 24K CAD..

Edited December 22, 2021 by Gribo

[X___]

5 hours ago, Gribo said:

Got to love how the 1 year subscription is 6K CAD and the 3 years is 24K CAD..

NI might know something about the value of the Canadian dollars that you may want to know...

[Gribo]

Inflation did not hit 10% yet.

[FixedWire]

So folks...what about a Plan B?

Python may have become a "fav" in some circles but having to dig for plugins is a pain at best and a disaster in the making if the code is anywhere near a regulated environment. Rolf nailed it with far too much code that just works but lacks architecture or isn't hardened. Choosing that one plugin could derail a project so fast if it needs to be rewritten.  In the real world we need tools that we can rely on.

Has anyone looked into Uno Platform or Avalonia? You'd think at this point and time one could build out projects that could easily port between Windows, Mac & Linux. Uno works off of C# & the .NET and thus caught my attention.

Just re-reading the above pains me for all this superb community does. So many sharp minds here, something good will evolve!

 

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

4 hours ago, FixedWire said:

So folks...what about a Plan B?

Python may have become a "fav" in some circles but having to dig for plugins is a pain at best and a disaster in the making if the code is anywhere near a regulated environment. Rolf nailed it with far too much code that just works but lacks architecture or isn't hardened. Choosing that one plugin could derail a project so fast if it needs to be rewritten.  In the real world we need tools that we can rely on.

Has anyone looked into Uno Platform or Avalonia? You'd think at this point and time one could build out projects that could easily port between Windows, Mac & Linux. Uno works off of C# & the .NET and thus caught my attention.

Just re-reading the above pains me for all this superb community does. So many sharp minds here, something good will evolve!

while Microsoft managed C# and .Net in a better way than NI did with LabVIEW, I'm still not quite sure if I should sell my soul to them! 🙂

[Gribo]

I can amortize 20,000$ one time license costs, I can't amortize 500$/ month subscription. Python seems more attractive every day. 

[ShaunR]

23 hours ago, FixedWire said:

So folks...what about a Plan B?

Python may have become a "fav" in some circles but having to dig for plugins is a pain at best and a disaster in the making if the code is anywhere near a regulated environment. Rolf nailed it with far too much code that just works but lacks architecture or isn't hardened. Choosing that one plugin could derail a project so fast if it needs to be rewritten.  In the real world we need tools that we can rely on.

Has anyone looked into Uno Platform or Avalonia? You'd think at this point and time one could build out projects that could easily port between Windows, Mac & Linux. Uno works off of C# & the .NET and thus caught my attention.

Just re-reading the above pains me for all this superb community does. So many sharp minds here, something good will evolve!

 

While Python has taken over T&M, I don't actually use it that much unless asked to. I don't even rate it as one of my core competencies. Outside of LabVIEW; for web stuff I use PHP (server) or Javascript (client) and everything else I use Codetyphon (WISIWIG IDE) or C (DLL's). When LabVIEW dies, it will be more CodeTyphon, PHP, Javascript and C depending on what I am doing.

Much of what I do nowadays is UI interfacing to back-ends (DLL's, web services etc). I moved away from the LabVIEW UI so it boils down to what to use for a UI. For web stuff it is HTML & Javascript, on the client side, and Apache & PHP, on the server. For desktop it is Codetyphon (which is an open source Object Pascal competitor to Visual Studio but programs can be compiled for almost anything).

I wouldn't touch .NET or C# with a 10 foot barge pole.

Edited December 28, 2021 by ShaunR