Honestly, I don't know - I think I read it as you have a choice of buying the ilok version or a hardware dependent version (I may have mis-read, in which case I am a spanner). Either way I'd expect Line 6 to be able to resolve this PDQ - there's too much competition out there for this stuff for them to be tricky about it - and although I have a variax and have used Gearbox and Pods before, I don't feel any particular loyalty to them on this one. You can probably tell I'm feeling a little frustrated - apologies! :)