Well, at 1/10 the standard price I'd expect there to be some restrictions... ;-)

David M. - thanks for your reply. I'd imagine that every now and then, whenever the computer is online, the locally-installed Mathematica connects with Wolfram so as to check that the license is valid. And I suppose that, when doing that, it sends its IP address thus indicating which country it's located in at the time, although I really don't know how license checks work (eg, I don't know what happens if the computer never goes online!). PS: I contacted Wolfram support a couple of days ago with my questions above but I still haven't heard back. I suppose I'll just keep waiting, although every day that passes by is another day without me using Mathematica.

Marc,

I guess the Wolfram licensing folk are the only ones who can properly answer the first part of your query but as a Home Edition user myself, I'm not sure how Mathematica would 'know' what location it was being used in as you do not need any kind of Internet access to use the basic software?

If you pay for the Home edition in a single hit, then that's all there is to it. The license doesn't expire at the end of a year (at least that what the guys at Wolfram UK told me). I just received the upgrade from 10.0 to 10.0.2 for free. That probably wouldn't be true for a major upgrade say going from 10 to 11 but then the Home Edition license fee is really good value for money in my opinion and so buying a new license when you want to take up a major improvement upgrade is not too unreasonable.