magnus@THEP.LU.SE (Magnus Olsson) (07/30/90)
Thanks to all the people who responded to my question. I've received about 15 e-mail messages, all of them more or less identical to the ones that got posted here, so PLEASE don't send me any more email on this issue - unless you have something truly novel to contribute, in which case you'd better post it here anyway. I apparently used too narrow a definition of 'Freeware' - obviously most people interpret it as meaning "everything that's free" while I used it for "Free software that's not Public Domain". One of the emails pointed out that you may not register a copyright in your own name for someone else's PD programs. That sounds rather reasonable, and is about what I meant by "you can't pass PD programs off as your own". Apparently, it's not legally forbidden to do it, though - but I imagine you *might* end up in rather a mess if you do it *too* aggressively (maybe even it could count as fraud in some cases). It was interesting to hear that it obviously isn't clear whether it's allowed to keep Shareware without paying. I've never liked the kind of shareware where the documentation says something like "You may use this program for two weeks without paying. If you decide to keep it after that period, you MUST pay $400. Otherwise, you are not allowed to keep the software". After all, it's clear that the authors have no way of enforcing this - I doubt any court would issue a search warrant just on the *suspicion* that someone is using unpaid shareware! IMHO, I think that if the authors really want *all* their users to pay, they should distribute a "crippled" demo version for free and sell the full version. "Crippleware" may be annoying - but nobody's forcing you to use it, after all Magnus Olsson | \e+ /_ Dept. of Theoretical Physics | \ Z / q University of Lund, Sweden | >----< Internet: magnus@thep.lu.se | / \===== g Bitnet: THEPMO@SELDC52 | /e- \q
brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) (08/01/90)
In article <9007300856.AA19891@thep.lu.se> magnus@THEP.LU.SE (Magnus Olsson) writes: > I've never liked the kind of >shareware where the documentation says something like "You may use this >program for two weeks without paying. If you decide to keep it after that .... While it's easy to see why people say they don't like this kind of shareware when it is contrasted with the "Pay if you feel like it" shareware, I still find it odd that it generates such negative feeling, even contrasted with regular software which is "you may not open the box and use it even once unless you pay." In fact, It almost seems that that former type of shareware generates more negative feeling than regular commercial software, and I would venture that the *vast* majority of people own far more commercial programs than shareware type I programs. Even though the Shareware type I authors are being far more reasonable and far nicer to the customer than the regular authors. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that the Shareware concept is a failure. You don't remind people strongly enough about payment and they don't pay. You remind them strongly and they resent it and don't pay. -- Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473