What to do about "A General License Error"

[Peter Hollands]

This post is primarily for  people that are new to MatrixPilot and MPLAB:-

From time to time, one can be happily using the evaluation MPLAB gcc C compiler, with a good know source version of the firmware,
when the compiler just stops with an error. It's called a "General License Error" and is shown in the enclosed screenshot.

"pic30-coff-cc1.exe: error: General License error, please install a license"

How do you overcome this problem ?

Simply tell MPLAB to "Build All" again. If you simply ask it to re-compile, it completes correctly on the second time around.
The error, which is not an error but seems to be a questionable marketing technique for new users to make them pay for the evaluation license,  seems to be introduced at spaced out random intervals by the compiler.

Do other people see this happen as well  ?
(note this is with revision 3_22 of the compiler. The current revision is 3_34).

Best wishes, Pete

[William Premerlani]

Hi Peter,

Thank you very much for the info.

Very interesting. If license error message is random, the frequency must be rather low. I have never seen this error, although I have done several dozen builds every day for the last couple of years.

I am going to be optimistic and assume it is a bug in the license manager that gets triggered randomly under the right conditions.

In any case, I do recall scattered reports of this issue, so it is good to know there is a solution.

I also recall that there was one user who was getting this error message every time they did a build, until they figured out what was wrong in their case, but I don't recall that they reported what the cause or fix was.

Best regards,

Bill