Reply: Shareware
Date:
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Categories:
[Tech]
Tags:
[Software]
I enjoyed the article What Happened to Shareware? from Dead Parrot BBS.
I still have my diskette for WinZip 6.2, and I think I owned a few other shareware programs. One I remember is Hex Workshop from around 1996, a hex editor for Windows. Hex Workshop was produced by Bob Anderson and BreakPoint Software. The company is still around!
Fifteen years after I bought Hex Workshop, I found myself looking for a good hex editor and remembered that I already owned one. I had the diskette and serial number, but the version didn’t run on my current computer. I saw that the company was still in business, so I contacted them to see about an upgrade. Bob had a record of my purchase, registered to a Compuserve email address. I was able to upgrade my copy.
Today, I won’t do subscriptions, but I make donations for free software that I use, like Blender, pi-hole, Vivaldi and others. I hope Dead Parrot is right, we’re ready for a return to something that makes better sense for developers and users both. “A good trial, a fair price, local operation, and a clear upgrade policy”. Sounds good to me.
