Protect Your Add-on with the LabVIEW Third Party Licensing and Activation Toolkit

[David_L]

If you are creating a LabVIEW Add-on and are planning to sell it, you will want to protect your IP from getting used without permission.  With the LabVIEW Third Party Licensing & Activation Toolkit, you can easily add licensing to your code to prevent anyone from using your add-on without permission.  You can also use the Licensing & Activation Toolkit to create evaluations of your product so that your customers can test your product for a limited time or with limited functionality before purchasing. 

With the LabVIEW Third Party Licensing & Activation Toolkit, there are two ways you can license a LabVIEW add-on.  For LabVIEW toolkits, you can use edit-time licensing to bind licensing to a project library.  When LabVIEW loads any VI from this library, it will first check if the license is valid. If the license is invalid or expired, the VI will be broken and the code will not be able to run.

The other option for licensing is run-time licensing for executables.  With run-time licensing,you add licensing VIs to the source code of your application.  These VIs check licensing when the application is running.  If the license is invalid or expired, you can disable functionality of the application, or close it entirely.

For more information on the LabVIEW Third Party Licensing & Activation Toolkit, view our community portal or contact the LabVIEW Partner Program team at labviewpartnerprogram@ni.com.

Bonus!!  Members of the LabVIEW 2011 Beta program can try out some new upcoming features of the Third Party Licensing & Activation Toolkit 2011, available on the LabVIEW 2011 Beta Forum.  If you are not signed up for the Beta Program, see this post for more details on how to get involved.