Stewart Midwinter <> writes:

A while back you reviewed all of the major flight planning software, including CompeGPS. Recently they've changed their licencing, and in a very underhanded way. They certainly don't mention it on their website anywhere where you'd find it before you bought it. And they never told their existing customers that they have implemented this. And let me say that if you knew about this feature, you'd probably not buy the product (which they probably realise, so they're trying to hide this from us).

They now tie your licence to a single installation. Once you register, that's it. If you uninstall the software, or your hard disk is wiped out, or you sell your PC or upgrade to a better notebook, and have to reinstall CompeGPS, you'll get an error message telling you that the maximum number of installations (one!) Has been exceeded. And the registration will fail. You then have to write to their tech support department and plead, cap in hand, for permission to install the software once again.

A year ago I moved from a PC to a MacBook, and ran into this limitation recently when I tried to install CompeGPS on it. CompeGPS tech support did agree to my request, but I don't know why they did, or why they wouldn't in the future, so I have little confidence that I can keep on using the software.

Today, I upgraded from a MacBook to a MacBook Pro. I actually took the hard drive out of the MacBook and installed it in the Pro. But I also created a new partition on the drive and installed Windows XP using Boot Camp (mostly so I can boot natively and get the best speed possible while running the Windows-native gliding flight Condor simulator). I installed CompeGPS in that native Windows partition (though I can also access that same installation via a Parallels virtual machine running in Mac OS X), and now I get that old "maximum number of installations exceeded" error again. I've made a request of CompeGPS to allow this move and am hopefully they'll agree to it (after all, I'm still only one person using that copy of CompeGPS I bought), but I sure don't see why I should be treated like a potential criminal each time I upgrade my hardware. Hell, even security-paranoid Apple allows you to reinstall iTunes five times (and you can de-register computers that are no longer using iTunes), so the CompeGPS approach seems excessively draconian.

If I knew about this "feature" prior to purchase, I'd sure be considering a competitor's product instead of CompeGPS, and I think other pilots out there should be made aware of this hidden restriction before they buy CompeGPS.

Discuss CompeGPS at the Oz Report forum
   
 
 
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