Re: [Fwd: Attend an NI LabVIEW hands-on seminar at UC Berkeley next week.]

On Wed, 2004-01-07 at 13:34, Rusty Wright wrote:
> Is LabVIEW free software?

Alas, no.
LabView is discounted, and NI has been very generous in donating
software and equipment to the department.
The only real licensing bugbear is that we only have it officially
running under Windows in our instructional labs. I run it under Linux
for my purposes, but LabView is one of those "killer applications",like
Matlab, for which the open-source alternatives (which, you would need a
great many smaller projects to be integrated to begin to address the
same scope as LabView) are considered comparatively lackluster.

It makes realtime data acquisition and lab automation/control
much easier for students, so they can learn the experiment/concepts and
not get bogged down in the implementation.
Hence why our department favors Matlab over C/Fortran, though the
more computationally minded professors still primarily use Fortran/C
for their own research, as much as for performance as historical
proclivities. And Matlab and LabView are considered "industry
standards", so in the interest of teaching students skills deemed
in demand by industry, they should have at least a working knowledge
of both.

Chicken and egg problem. I hope to someday have a professor who wants to
teach undergrads engineering on Linux. Linux is currently a mainstay of
the department in the research labs/ graduate-level only.

But I would prefer using Octave, gnuplot, and Comedi, and maybe some
students devoted to enhancing these projects, instead of spending money
on commercial applications like Matlab or LabView.

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Received on Wed Jan 7 14:36:37 2004