Re: OpenG Serial drivers

[Martin H. <mar...@mh...>]

Hi Mark,

Mark Balla wrote:

> The Wisconsin User Group Steering comity Just recently ask our District
> Sales Manager this NI Visa question.
> He did some research and replied with this response.

[...]

> Today, our licensing policy DOES NOT require a customer to pay a licensing
> fee for NI-VISA if the deployment target contains NI hardware or software
> written using NI development software. In the scenario where you have a
> LabVIEW VI or EXE talking on a built-in serial port, National Instruments
> allows the first 10 distributions for free and after that we require a
> licensing fee.  We are about to change our licensing policy to allow up to
> 100 distributions per application for free and after that require a
> license.

[...]

Oh  yes,  i  know  that,  but  have  you  read  the  licence
agreements?  I only found that NI supplies different licence
agreements  on  their  FTP  server, all targeting NI-VISA. I
havn't  read  them  all, but up to now I did't find anything
about 10 or 100 free installations.

For   me  it  is  actually  unclear

- which of the licence agreements have to be used (for which
labview version or for which hardware or whatever).

- where the licence agreement is which correctly and clearly
explains how many installations can be used.

-  how  a  developer  should be able to ensure that only the
number of allowed installations ere exists in the world.

-  where  is  clearly  explained  under what circumstances a
developer  can  distribute the VISA runtime installer. (only
when creating an installer with LabVIEW7 as explained in one
of the licences? - what is with LV 5, 6, 6.1 and 7.1?)

-  If  NI  changes  the  licencing  issue, whats about older
versions/installations.

...

I can understand NI, that they wants to mainly support their
hardware  and  I also understand, that they would have a fee
if  anyone  is  using  their  software  without  using their
hardware.  That's  not the topic here - but we all have paid
for  LabVIEW  and we all should be able to use the basics of
our PC and operating system (which we also have paid for).

-- 
73 de Martin, DL5NAH