No question about it—SD5 has a nice feature set. I was tempted to upgrade...er, until I saw that there's no upgrade path from SD3. Well...there wasn't enough reason to upgrade from SD3 to SD4, so I skipped v4. Oops...YazSoft's Kagi Page lists an upgrade option only for SD4 users. Licenseholders for earlier versions are disenfranchised, apparently. It's either pay for the full license, or keep on using SD3, which still works just fine. Of course, there's SD"Lite" now, which includes only the downloader without all the other features, but then if all I get is the downloader, I might as well just stick with SD3.

I'm pleased with YazSoft in general. SpeedDownload is a terrific application, YazSoft's support is excellent, and they work hard at keeping SpeedDownload up to date, relevant, and full of useful features. And the software just works! I still have my license for the original version of SpeedDownload, so I'm running it on my MacBook Pro...and it still works fine.

In fact, I would have upgraded to SD 4 if I had been able to use it on all my machines, but YazSoft's licensing policy doesn't allow that. Most hip developers recognize that a single user has a legitimate need to install an app on more than one machine—usually two, at least...a desktop and a notebook computer—and their licensing policy reflects that real-world condition. Not so with SpeedDownload. Drat! It's especially irritating because I'm a real stickler for adhering to licensing terms. I could work around the per-machine restriction, but I won't. The license terms are what they are. I don't like them, but I agreed to honor them, and that's that.

So, I guess my only complaints are these:

• Current upgrade policy doesn't provide any consideration to licensees who owned a version earlier than SD4.
• The license is per machine, not per user.

Ah, well...since my earlier versions are working fine and I have to pay full price anyway, I might as well skip SD5 too. But YazSoft should reconsider their licensing terms; they're leaving money on the table. If the license terms were per user rather than per machine, I'd have upgraded to SD4. And if their upgrade policy gave some consideration to licensed users of versions earlier than SD4, I'd have upgraded to SD5. As it is, I'll hang on to my money and make do with the older versions.