NI's New Software Subscription Model

[X___]

On 7/30/2022 at 12:12 PM, LogMAN said:

 

Powered by LabVIEW NXG 😋

Actually the original is quite possibly funnier:

Oh, and there is a second version of it:

and even a Wikipedia page with very interesting background information:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_encabulator

 

Edited August 2, 2022 by X___

[crossrulz]

2 hours ago, X___ said:

I've got to ask: what is the second oldest?

Prostitution.  Adam was a farmer.

[X___]

I thought that was the first... at least according to popular secular tradition: link

I guess this is the old question of which one came first of the hen and the egg...

[JKSH]

4 hours ago, X___ said:

I've got to ask: what is the second oldest?

Your last Wikipedia link has a link to the answer(s) 😁 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World's_second_oldest_profession

Edited August 2, 2022 by JKSH

[X___]

8 hours ago, JKSH said:

Your last Wikipedia link has a link to the answer(s) 😁 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World's_second_oldest_profession

Make it ten...

[MartinP]

I got my new quotation today, trying to sell me the subscription idea. I replied that I'll stick with my LabVIEW 2021 until further notice, and do not accept the new license model. I recomend all other LabVIEW programmers to do the same.

Martin

[X___]

3 hours ago, MartinP said:

I got my new quotation today, trying to sell me the subscription idea. I replied that I'll stick with my LabVIEW 2021 until further notice, and do not accept the new license model. I recomend all other LabVIEW programmers to do the same.

Martin

Just don't hold your breath.

[LogMAN]

4 hours ago, MartinP said:

I recomend all other LabVIEW programmers to do the same.

To what end?

NI will never go back to perpetual licenses, no matter how many offers we reject.

Mainstream support for LabVIEW 2021 ends in August 2025, which means no driver support, no updates, and no bug fixes.  By then you should have a long-term strategy and either pay for subscriptions or stop using LabVIEW.

As a side note, if you own a perpetual license you can get up to 3 years of subscription for the price of your current SSP. This should give you enough time to figure out your long-term strategy and convince management  

Quote

What will happen if I currently own a perpetual software license when my SSP renewal is up? 

We will quote you for a subscription license of your software at a one-time price that is the same as your SSP renewal quote would have been. You can pre-purchase up to a three-year subscription term at that per-year rate. This one-time price is available whenever your SSP renewal expires. For example, if you purchased software in 2021 with 3 years of SSP, the one-time price will be available to you in 2024.

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

Of course, if you let your SSP expire and are later forced to upgrade, than you have to pay the full price...

[ShaunR]

2 hours ago, LogMAN said:

Mainstream support for LabVIEW 2021 ends in August 2025, which means no driver support, no updates, and no bug fixes.

Oooh. Scary. Perhaps I should stop using LabVIEW 2009 and get a subscription?

Your budgetary arguments to management have no power here 

Edited August 16, 2022 by ShaunR

[LogMAN]

[Jordan Kuehn]

3 minutes ago, LogMAN said:

perfect. I think you can swap LVOOP in there too

[ShaunR]

45 minutes ago, LogMAN said:

[Gribo]

Get out of my mind, damn you!

[X___]

As part of their 100-year of "Engineer Ambitiously" TM "at your speed", NI has in fact implemented a very clever strategy to motivate people from migrating away from their products: make permanent license re-activatable every year and make the reactivation process completely opaque or downright impossible.

The idea is that after a few frustrating phone calls ending in the connecting ending in prolonged silence after an attempted "transfer" with tech support, you are supposed to give up and write off 25+ years of code development using a desperately closed and outdated language to finally embrace the open source

Now tech support is working from home, so they are probably free to decide that they won't pick up calls, or maybe the call routing system at NI is hopelessly rotten (dropped calls appear to be systematic), but this problems would not exist in the first place if permanent licenses were really what their name indicate.

This is not just me saying that: https://lavag.org/topic/22538-labview-activation-issues/

I am not in a mood or position to file a lawsuit, but this is erring on the side of commercial deception...

[X___]

BTW, if someone still believe that a debug and deployment license will allow them to develop software, they need to wake up or prove that this is the case. According to the NI home employees (and beyond, see below) I talked to, that is not the case. For LabVIEW, for Vision Development Module, etc. True, these are PERMANENT licenses, but you can't do much with them.

The funny part is that a guy from Newark (the company that distributed NI product, to which NI sales transferred me to get additional information - this gets better by the hour) tried to explained to me that with a debug and deployment license, you cannot develop new code, but you can debug and fix a released executable (exe file). I asked him how that would work and then thanked him very much.

😭

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

23 minutes ago, X___ said:

BTW, if someone still believe that a debug and deployment license will allow them to develop software, they need to wake up or prove that this is the case. According to the NI home employees (and beyond, see below) I talked to, that is not the case. For LabVIEW, for Vision Development Module, etc. True, these are PERMANENT licenses, but you can't do much with them.

The funny part is that a guy from Newark (the company that distributed NI product, to which NI sales transferred me to get additional information - this gets better by the hour) tried to explained to me that with a debug and deployment license, you cannot develop new code, but you can debug and fix a released executable (exe file). I asked him how that would work and then thanked him very much.

😭

Technically you can do exactly the same as with the full license. If the support person told you otherwise they are fudding you. Legally however there is indeed a difference. The Deployment licenses are perpetual and let you run LabVIEW code in source code just as with the Development system and full licenses for Toolkits etc. They even let you modify the code and here is the legal gotcha. The Deployment license is NOT meant as a replacement for the Development license but as an add-on purchase. NI is fine about a user doing minor refinement on the source code such as when fixing bugs during debugging on the target machine. But if you start to do serious development with it you are definitely violating the license.

Of course, where bug fixing ends and development starts exactly is of course a bit of an open question. As long as the Deployment license is not the only active license you own, NI is almost certainly not going to do anything about it. (Even if you do all the development on the machine with the Deployment license and let the Development license sleep on your laptop for reason of convenience, they won't bug you here). But if you only own the Deployment license anymore and do anything with it besides running your VIs in source code (Deployment) or doing minor debugging fixes (Debugging) then you are definitely violating the license. And of course the Deployment license is also a viable solution to look at your old VIs. As long as you don't modify them (much) or create executables from them, you are using the Deployment license for what it is meant.

I still hope that NI decides to actually make the evaluation license turn into a viewer license after the evaluation period expired, instead of not letting LabVIEW startup anymore. In the Viewer mode all editing, recompiling and application building could be disabled but you still could load your existing VIs, look at them and create screenshots or print them out and maybe even run them. It should take not to much effort to make that change and would alleviate some of the complaints about the subscription model such as that you loose any and all access to your self written code once your subscription expires. Other CAD packages such as Altium do it in a similar way, there you can look at your schemata and PCB designs with a viewer license that can be requested at no cost from Altium after installing the software.

If they don't do that, there will be various tools that can create such and also full licenses for free and the moral restraint to use them will be very low in view of such a hostile license policy.

Edited August 19, 2022 by Rolf Kalbermatter

[X___]

To tell you the truth, right now I am feeling owned for not being able to open LabVIEW 2021 SP1 after having installed it in December 2021 under a "permanent" Academic License (idem for the Vision Development Module).

I am being told there never was such a thing as a permanent academic license. Oh yeah? So why can I open my LabVIEW 2019 SP1 and LabVIEW 2018 SP1 versions installed with the same license number on the same machine?

I forgot to say that another NI employee I was talking with today (I talked with three, not including the Newark guy) told me that this was impossible because an academic license was only supposed to allow using the latest version of LabVIEW. Needless to say, she had nothing to answer to my explaining what I just said in the previous sentence (that is that I was running TWO old versions simultaneously).

So far, I haven't talked to a single NI employee who seemed to really know what they were talking about. It's absolutely all downhill and I have absolutely zero trust in this company. Stock is doing great though, so the smokescreen and psychedelics are doing wonders.

[JKSH]

18 hours ago, X___ said:

I am feeling owned for not being able to open LabVIEW 2021 SP1 after having installed it in December 2021 under a "permanent" Academic License (idem for the Vision Development Module).

In the beginning, "permanent"/"perpetual" activations were exactly that: You activate it once, and then it would stay activated forever (unless you deliberately deactivate/uninstall it, or your machine dies).

A few years ago, NI's activation server changed its behaviour: After you activate something, it would stay activated until early August. Even if you have a perpetual commercial (non-subscription, non-academic) license, you have to re-activate every August. It's a weird system: If I activated at the end of July, I would need to re-activate again within 2 weeks.

I don't know if Academic licenses were treated any differently or not (my company had a Developer Suite), but your descriptions sounded like what we had to go through.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

19 hours ago, X___ said:

To tell you the truth, right now I am feeling owned for not being able to open LabVIEW 2021 SP1 after having installed it in December 2021 under a "permanent" Academic License (idem for the Vision Development Module).

I am being told there never was such a thing as a permanent academic license. Oh yeah? So why can I open my LabVIEW 2019 SP1 and LabVIEW 2018 SP1 versions installed with the same license number on the same machine?

I forgot to say that another NI employee I was talking with today (I talked with three, not including the Newark guy) told me that this was impossible because an academic license was only supposed to allow using the latest version of LabVIEW. Needless to say, she had nothing to answer to my explaining what I just said in the previous sentence (that is that I was running TWO old versions simultaneously).

So far, I haven't talked to a single NI employee who seemed to really know what they were talking about. It's absolutely all downhill and I have absolutely zero trust in this company. Stock is doing great though, so the smokescreen and psychedelics are doing wonders.

How long a license is valid is actually part of the activation process. In the according license response there is either a "permanent", an explicit expiry date or "1-jan-1900" for an unactivated license. I believe that in intention most volume licenses were for a long time already meant to be a lease with explicit expiry date but the license servers from NI often issued a permanent license anyhow. If that was an oversight, a technical problem or some forced process because of compatibility problems I do not know. It was obviously not very clearly communicated in many cases. Not so for Alliance Member leases. That was pretty clear that it is a limited term license and would not let you run the software anymore once you stop paying.

So in principle you would have to find the original paperwork, see what it stated back then and then analyse everything. It could be that you did in the past indeed receive a perpetual license with an academic volume license. But if it doesn't say so, you will have a tough stand. The fact that you still can use your old LabVIEW versions without having to reactivate them is not proof that you have actually a perpetual license. It could be also due to a failure or omission when configuring the license servers in the past. If you can proof that it was in the past really a perpetual license that your institution ordered and paid for, because it states so in the invoice or quotes you received then, you might have a chance to appeal the silent change to a lease. It would be a change of contract and NI would have had to clearly inform you about that and offer your institute the option to terminate the agreement. But without such proof, your chances to change anything now are pretty much non existent.

[Porter]

Huh...

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

45 minutes ago, Porter said:

Huh...

What is your question? 😀

Yes we do have customers wanting to have test software written in Python. Not just since this year. It is not my preferred development platform, despite having written LabPython only about 20 years ago. But I just recently did support for a project that is supposed to do image analysis in Python, but my task was to do the image analysis based on a Matlab script but implement it in C as a shared library to call from Python through ctypes, since the routines ported to Python were to slow for the desired test throughput.

Edited August 20, 2022 by Rolf Kalbermatter

[LogMAN]

11 hours ago, Rolf Kalbermatter said:

Yes we do have customers wanting to have test software written in Python.

10 hours ago, Rolf Kalbermatter said:

implement it in C as a shared library to call from Python through ctypes, since the routines ported to Python were to slow for the desired test throughput.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

22 hours ago, LogMAN said:

He looks cute to me. 😃

[ShaunR]

9 hours ago, Rolf Kalbermatter said:

He looks cute to me. 😃

Kawaii?

[X___]

Update on "disappearing" permanent license.

 

Well, there is at least one helpful person at NI, and I was lucky enough to find him...

Long story short (this has been going on since my last post on the topic, more than 2 weeks ago) NI screwed up internally (or, a possibility that was cautiously hinted at, the licensing code is buggy) and voided our permanent license.

After (presumably) some testing, they haven't been able to fix the problem and offered me to:

1) exceptionally issue a new permanent license number that will replace our voided one.

2) escalate the issue to the R & D team to figure it out (the hint I was referring to).

I chose 1 after having strongly suggested they go for 2) anyway, as I (we) can't be the only one affected.

It also turned out that they screwed up our license renewal (i.e. the migration to an annual academic subscription license) and gave our Department a quote for a one month (!) license, soon to expire. I don't really care about that one, as I have no intention to upgrade, but just sayin'... There is truly something rotten in the State of Denmark.