I have a question about RouterOS license levels and which RouterOS versions they can run. It's discussed on these pages:

* http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:License_levels
* http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:All_about_licenses

Using an RB493 as an example, its spec sheet says it runs RouterOS v3 at license level 4. According to the links above this means that it can only run RouterOS v4 and not v5, is this correct? I had a RB750 I was testing with and put 5 beta on it and it ran fine. Does the license issue only kick in once it's beyond beta?

if your license allows upgrade upto version N, then you may use also version (N+1)beta, but not (N+1)release

if your license allows upgrade upto version N, then you may use also version (N+1)beta, but not (N+1)release

Interesting that it can run betas. Is that to entice you to buy an upgrade license (can you buy an upgrade license?) or is this licensing scheme intended to deprecate old hardware?

Mikrotik can also decide to offer you more ugprades with new license keys.

I bought an RB1000 with 3.23 at the time, which was good until 5.x (level 6 license = two major upgrades). Upgrading to 4.x required upgrading the license, which also bumped that up: "/system license print" now shows me good until 6.x.

Perfect, I'm seeing upgradeable-to: v5.x on some (RB433) and v6.x on others (RB493AH) so I think I'm good for a while.