I’m using a trial of Scrivener and loving it. I want to acquire a license to Mac OS, however, I’m a bit weird when it comes to my writing. I have a Mac mini M4 but I also love to use old Mac computers, specially some PowerPC mac’s like the iBook or PowerBook G4. So, my question is: I know you’re not selling licenses to scrivener 2 anymore, but I’m wondering, would be possible to get a free license to scrivener 2 if I acquire a license to scrivener 3? I know the projects from scrivener 3 won’t work directly in 2 (I’ll have to export as a 2 project), doesn’t matter. I can deal with that.
If you currently own a license for Scrivener 2, you can use it at will. – Forever.
If you don’t, the question is legitimate, but I think you should ask the staff at Literature & Latte directly. (No user can really answer that question. – If there is a precedent, I, personally, have never heard of it.)
This said, if your computers can run Scrivener 3, I’d advise against your plan to back and forth your project(s) between versions of the app.
It’s not just that we are no longer selling Scrivener 2 licenses. We are no longer able to issue them, even if we wanted to. Our former registration provider went out of business, and the new provider doesn’t support the frameworks Scrivener 2 uses.
That said, because of the licensing provider change, we made available a version of Scrivener 2.9 that can be run without it on macOS 10.11 or earlier, which sounds like your use case. It’s worth recognising that there are significant changes between Scrivener 2 and 3, so you’ll want to think about how you’re going to handle some of that going between newer and older machines—settings that wouldn’t be preserved when downgrading and so on. There will likely be a point when you’ll want to keep the project in Scrivener 3 for ease of compiling, but if you’re just using the old machines for getting down the initial draft, that may not matter to you. Realise though that what you’ve been testing in the 3.x trial won’t all be the same in 2.9!
Another complication is PowerPC though, which the free 2.9 build can’t run on. You need 2.5 for that, which was the last version of Scrivener that was compiled for that chipset, and it is a normal build that requires activation from the old vendor. By the time they went under, it was no longer possible to make PowerPC builds.
So you would be better off sticking with old Intel models—10.7 up, ideally.