Cheers Suggestion: advise 'your legally upright friend' to buy paper charts (s/h & out-of-date would be perfectly ok) of the areas he intends to sail in. I actually have reasonably up to date UK ones, but a friend wants some and insists on purchasing them legally (he is an upright kind of guy and very decent). To download them is, of cource, completely illegal. I've seen sources for CM93v2 covering the entire world and only dating back to spring 2010. It's very easy to find illegal copies of the previous generation of CM93 charts on the internet - anyone should be able to manage that in a few minutes with Google. OpenCPN specifically cannot use the latest CM93 charts which are copy protected. I don't think that Jepson sell them any longer - because they were too easy to pirate. It works better with vector format charts for which it requires the unencrypted CM93 format charts that came from Jepson. Any users of the plotter care to say where they get charts from? Or is it only any use when cruising where charts aren't copyright? Well, OpenCPN can work with a variety of Raster format charts - which you can either purchase, or create by scanning paper charts and calibrating them. Having looked at the Open CPN documentation I don't see any source for charts of UK waters.
Why not just download them for 'planning purposes'? For Bahamas, Exumas etc we have a full set of Garmin charts on dedicated plotters, so again no need to resort to the CM93s.
In our case they are not actually used for navigation, since we do have the USA ones and are not outside of USA waters to need the CM93s other than for interest these days. That said I do have also the worldwide CM93/2 ones from Jan 2010 downloaded, along with millions of other peeps. Cheers Our cruising ground now is in Uncle Sam's territory so we have all the USA charts and pilots in both raster and vector formats totally free of charge.:) No updating ever required, just download new charts as you need them and OpenCPN (fantastic program) selects the latest one from your folio to use.