Industry Opinion

Shareware
response by Erin Dalzell

I think shareware is wonderful. Sure, there are applications out there that aren't very good. But isn't that always true?? Even with commercial products?? I would be very upset, for example, if I spent $300 on a piece of software that crashed every other time I used it and the company took 3 weeks to release an update.

But, in all my shareware experience, I have found that the authors have been extremely quick to respond. In fact, most of them offer you free registration if you are the first to report a bug!! How's that for PR?!?

Shareware is one of the reasons the Mac is so nice. I have played with some PC shareware and frankly, the quality was not great. And you really do get good bag for your buck. Think about it, you can get a great Web server, FTP server and gopher server for about $10 (NetPresenz), a wonderful editor (BBEdit), the best compression (Stuffit) all the Internet apps you could ask for (Eudora, IE, Nifty Telnet, Anarchie, Fetch, Gopher, IRC), all for about $100!!!!

I am proud to say that I support the shareware industry by paying for every piece of shareware that I use.

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