On Friday 27 August 2004 03:20 pm, Richard Smoot wrote:
> Before Linux and even Windows I was a great fan of freeware and shareware.
> A lot of that worked better than the commercial stuff.
>
> Richard Smoot
Yes, many moons ago shareware was better than a lot of commercial software.
then it started going downhill. The next phase was bloatware, following the
trend of "if it is bigger it has to be better", and a lot of it was still
good. Then it somehow became crippleware, which made no sense at all to me.
How are you supposed to properly evaluate an app if the important functions
are disabled?
There were a handful of guys that developed some really useful apps that
generated their unlock keys based upon your hardware. Every time you replaced
or upgraded one of those key pieces of hardware, you had to call them up to
get a new unlock key because the signature had been changed and the app
reverted back to crippleware. Which wasn't that bad until they decided to no
longer support that app or simply ceased to exist (bought out, closed up
shop, etc,,), at which point the customer has paid for software that he can
no longer use. Or that the user can not register when he finds a copy on the
web.
Jeff
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