I am looking at what S/W to use in a new mill build.
Mach4 is coming, but it will not be an upgrade from Mach3.
I prefer not to have to pay twice.

So what is the best thinking for a guy like me?

Should I wait for 4?
or forget about 4 and go for 3?
or can I buy 4 now and get a temporary license for 3 until delivered?
or should I just shut up and pay both?

/j

At this time I think we are going to be able to put out Mach4 for pre-release sale, we neet to be 100% sure of the controllers.

Thank you, but you will have to pardon me, because I struggle to make sense of this sentence.
The "we neet to be 100% sure of the controllers" make it sound like you forgot a "not" in the first part?

(but if M4 comes up for pre-release sale I'll put in an order  )

I think what he is letting you/us know is that unless you/we have a device that works with Mach4, buying it would be a premature purchase. Because if you buy the software (it gets locked to a computer) and if that computer is driving a controller not supported, you have a working copy that wont move your machine.

What I am saying is that we want to be 100% confident that you are going to be happy when we get a release out with motion.... As soon as we are confident we will allow license to get purchased.  Now for Hobby you can have more then one machine so I don't see the locking to a PC as an issue..

Thanks
Brian

Other than the guy creating all the Hobby licenses 

I thought that Hobby was all that was available at this time.

Does that mean we can get a Hobby license for each computer we have? We just provide a list of the PC ID's?    Gotta love that. 

Can/Will the Hobby version and the Pro version occupy two separate folders, and have their own individual license?

Or can a laptop/portable device have multiple controllers and be moved from one CNC machine to another just rename machine.ini file for each?

This will all be on the webpage as soon as we can.

With M3 you could have it on as many machines as you desired. Will M4 be different in that way?

For hobby users it will be the same.