Subject: Programmatically Check NI License
Message-ID: <0d4d01d6f98b$0b976590$22c630b0$@solidusintegration.com>

Urs, thanks for your comments!

Each software vendor has to decide which software capabilities should come
as part of the main product and which should be separately licensed add-ons.
NI apparently believes that something that is commonly used should be
included as part of the main product, e.g. NI-VISA, even when it is used
with non-NI hardware. This certainly makes sense to me: you don't want a
<b>significant percentage</b> of your customers to go through an extra step
in purchase/registration. Following the same logic, I believe that something
as common as support for webcams, including basic image display and
manipulation capabilities, should be bundled into the main license. I don't
mind heavy image processing and machine vision libraries being a separately
licensed add-on, but most commonly used stuff should be included into the
main product license.

Regular users (in this particular case, biologists) find registering the
Vision runtime license difficult, so I had to make a very simple interface
for installing the license from within my application, including situations
when the PC is not on the Internet. NI helped me in this development by
pointing me to their command-line license installation utility.
Unfortunately, and quite unexpectedly to me, the very same utility has no
capabilities to check on the existence of a previously installed license!

Clearly there's a way to check for installed licenses from within LV - the
existence of error code -1074360282 proves it - but NI support could not
find any info on how to do it, and I did not escalate the issue to LV
developers.

Thanks,

Sergey


-----Original Message-----
Message: 1
Date: Mon, 1 Feb 2021 11:51:46 +0100

From: Urs Lauterburg lauterburgurs at me.com
To: Info-LabVIEW <info-labview at lists.infolabview.org>
Subject: Re: Programmatically Check NI License
Message-ID: <9876726F-F98A-442C-9DD2-8EBEDE80C8B2 at me.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

Hi Sergey,

Nobody seems to be able to help (at least not online) and neither am I. This
whole licensing maze really raises the question about how much resource it?s
worth to spend on administrational tasks. After all, administrational
efforts can get to the point were they are entirely used up to maintain the
overhead. However, its justification may be a universal scheme of social
behavior. It would of course be much cheaper without door keys, safes,
police and lawyers but there will always be thiefs.

This elaboration will most certainly not help you to solve your problem
though. Maybe the license places a certain file some place in the system and
you could possibly check on its existence. Just a spontaneous simple idea
though ;-).

Happy wireworks

Urs

> Am 30.01.2021 um 22:46 schrieb Sergey Liberman
<sliberman at solidusintegration.com>:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I need my standalone LV2017 program to query the status of an NI license
on
> its local Windows 10 PC (specifically, NI Vision Development Deployment
> license). Currently I do it by starting image acquisition from its webcam
> and checking for errors (e.g. error -1074360282, "license not activated"),
> but it's an ugly way to do it. There's got to be a way to interact with
the
> NILM directly. Any suggestions on how to do it?
>
> (To clarify the situation: the installer of my program installs among
other
> things NI-IMAQdx Runtime which also installs NILM as its dependency.)
>
> As a side note, I find this license pretty annoying. Remember the days
when
> NI required a license to use the VISA RS232 API? Well, webcams are as
> prominent today as COM ports in the olden days. Time to include the vision
> acquisition driver and some basic image display capabilities license-free!
>
> Thanks,
>
> Sergey